“Alienation and Authenticity in Albert Camus’ The Stranger”

Just finished reading the short novel The Stranger by Albert Camus, and what stays with me most is not the crime alone, but the strange-familiar stillness of the man who commits it.

From the very beginning, the narrative places us inside Meursault’s mind, and through his detached voice, we encounter a peculiar form of alienation. The novel opens with the death of his mother, a woman he visited only on Sundays, and sometimes not even then. Their relationship had grown so distant that they were almost strangers. He had little in common with her, little to say, and perhaps little to feel, and he knew she felt the same. When she dies, he does not cry, nor does he attempt to fake grief. He attends the funeral because it’s expected, but he does not ask to have the coffin opened. Most would have asked to have the nails removed to see their dead parent one last time; he does not. Time had already sealed that distance long before the coffin was nailed shut.

This detachment is not cruelty; without a doubt, it is consistency. Meursault refuses to lie about what he does not feel. When others—like his mother’s lover—weep openly, he understands their grief, yet he cannot imitate it. Camus constructs this emotional honesty to confront society’s demand for visible sentiment. The court later judges him not only for murder but for failing to cry at his mother’s funeral. In this way, Camus reveals how society values performance over authenticity.

His other relationships further illustrate this same indifference, shaped more by physical immediacy—by context or situation—than by emotional depth. With Marie, there is genuine physical pleasure and companionship. Their swim in the sea and their intimacy are natural, almost instinctive. There is no grand declaration of eternal love or dramatic promises. When she asks if he loves her, he says it does not mean anything, but that he probably does not. Yet he agrees to marry her if that is what she wants. This is not romance in the traditional sense; it is proximity turning into possibility. Camus strips love of its poetic illusion, even of its subtle narcissism, and presents it as a simple extension of physical presence rather than a metaphysical bond.

With Raymond, the relationship is similarly detached. Raymond considers Meursault as a close friend, but Meursault’s involvement seems passive—he helps him write a letter, accompanies him to the beach—not out of loyalty or moral conviction, but because there’s no strong reason not to. Even the old man and his dog mirror this strange attachment: they curse and mistreat each other, yet cannot exist apart. Unlike them, Meursault does not cling. He participates, but he does not bind himself to the participant or the act itself.

The murder of the unnamed Arab man marks the novel’s turning point. The act itself is disturbingly mechanical. The sun presses down; the heat disorients him. The glare of light on the knife, the oppressive brightness of the Algerian beach—these sensory elements dominate the moment. Camus uses the sun almost symbolically, as if nature itself pushes events forward. Meursault fires once, then four more times into a body already fallen. The repetition is absurd, excessive, and yet consistent with his detachment. It’s less an act of hatred than a rupture in the indifferent flow of events. The absurdity lies in how something so irreversible can emerge from something so trivial.

Here, the philosophy of the absurd—central to Camus’s thought—becomes clear. Life has no inherent meaning; humans demand one anyway. Meursault does not fabricate meaning to comfort himself. He accepts the physical world—the sun, the sea, the present moment—without imposing a moral narrative upon it. That refusal unsettles society. The courtroom scenes reveal this clearly: the judge, the priest, and the jury all seek his confession, remorse, and repentance—whether voluntary or forced. They want him to say he’s sorry, to acknowledge guilt not just legally but emotionally, even if it might buy him a reprieve. But until the very end, he cannot. He will not lie.

Near the conclusion, when he finally speaks with intensity, he broadens the scope of guilt itself. If he is guilty, then so is Marie, who will one day kiss another man while he lies dead; so is the old man, who cursed and mistreated his dog yet still loved him; so is Raymond, who betrayed his friend and reacted with violence. In that moment, Meursault suggests that human contradictions are universal. His crime is judged as singular and monstrous, yet human inconsistency and desire are everywhere. Society isolates him as immoral, but he sees himself as no more hypocritical than anyone else—only more honest.

He believes in no God and refuses to spend his final days entertaining ideas of salvation or rehearsing guilt he does not genuinely feel. He is neither apologetic nor conformist, and it is precisely this refusal that leads him to the guillotine. Yet he accepts his fate with the same lucid detachment that has defined him throughout the novel. To the priest, his death appears tragic, even spiritually urgent; to the court, it is a moral necessity. But to Meursault, it is simply inevitable.

His execution may distress Marie and Raymond—those who remain among the living—but their grief belongs to them, not to him. Once dead, he will no longer participate in their sorrow. In this sense, death strips away illusion as thoroughly as life once did. Only the living matter to the living; the dead no longer stand within the economy of feeling. In accepting this, Meursault does not despair. He merely acknowledges the indifferent order of existence and chooses not to pretend otherwise.

His journey begins with death (his mother’s), moves through death (the killing on the beach), and ends with his own impending execution. Yet throughout these transformations, he remains unchanged. Circumstances shift dramatically, but he persists as the same detached observer. In prison, awaiting his execution, he faces death with the same clarity he brought to life. When he rejects the priest’s attempt to impose faith, it’s not rebellion for drama’s sake; it’s the final affirmation of his honesty. He chooses lucidity over comfort.

Camus’s narrative style reinforces this philosophy. The prose is plain, direct, almost report-like. There’s little ornamentation. This simplicity mirrors Meursault’s internal landscape: factual, immediate, unembellished. Symbolism—the blazing sun, the endless sea, the oppressive courtroom—functions quietly beneath the surface, deepening the sense of existential isolation without overt explanation.

In the end, Meursault is a stranger not only to society but to its illusions. He does not pretend grief, love, faith, or remorse when he does not feel them. For this, he is condemned as much as for murder. Through him, Camus questions whether authenticity itself is intolerable in a world built on shared fictions. The novel doesn’t just tell the story of a crime; it presents a man who refuses to lie about existence, and a society that cannot forgive him for that refusal.

(PC: 经本 正一)