The Stranger by Albert Camus - Notes and Comments

     In the same vein as the previous post on The Fall here are my selected notation from The Stranger by Albert Camus.  There is a much different feel to this novel and that is primarily to the fact that while one can relate to it's narrator, there is somewhat of a disconnection between the reader and the emotions or motivations of the narrator.  Of course, there is probably a reason the novel is titled "The Stranger"!  I did not consider The Stranger to be as awe-inspiring and "life-altering", knock-me-off-my-socks great as The Fall.  However, I think that that is somewhat intentional of the author.  There is a great feeling of love and charisma and compassion that comes from The Fall.  The Stranger  sets us, rather, with an anti-hero of sorts.  Nonetheless we can all relate with "the stranger" as well as the experiences he endures throughout the novel.  With a deep examination of and the utmost empathy for Meursault we can actually find that he portrays the truest parts of ourselves; hose that have become mundane and those that are deeply repressed.  There is much to be learned of human kind and our own selves in the educational, always bitter, and rarely sweet pages of The Stranger.


The Stranger by Albert Camus (Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie)

                “when The Stranger was published in occupied Paris in June 1942 the name Albert Camus meant nothing to the French public… by 1945 Camus was being ranked… as one of the foremost writers of the period and, to judge by recent estimates, which suggest that in French The Stranger has 200,000 new readers a year, it is clear that his reputation has not waned since then” (xi)

                “Meursault, then, is not an automaton, devoid of emotion, incapable of pleasure or reflection.  On the contrary, it is in the name of alternative values that he undemonstratively opposes those of society” (xvii)

                “although Camus owes something to Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger, his true masters are the French moralists of the seventeenth century.  He is classical Mediterranean… the philosophy of Camus is a philosophy of the Absurd, and for him the Absurd springs from the relation of man to the world, of his legitimate aspirations to the vanity and futility of human wishes” (Jean-Paul Sartre) (xix)

                “The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’ stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of post-war Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity” (xxvii)

                “It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed” (23)

                “I said that people never change their lives, that in any case on life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all” (40)

                “Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace.  And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness” (57)

                “At one time or another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead” (63)

                “When I was first imprisoned, the hardest thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man” (73)

                “I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison.  He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored” (75-76)

                “A man had left a Czech village to seek his fortune.  Twenty-five years later, and now rich, he had returned with a wife and a child.  His mother was running a hotel with his sister in the village where he’d been born.  In order to surprise them, he’d left his wife and child at another hotel and gone to see his mother, who didn’t recognize him when he walked in.  As a joke he’d had the idea of taking a room.  He had shown off his money.  During the night his mother and his sister had beaten him to death with a hammer in order to rob him and had thrown his body in the river.  The next morning the wife had come to the hotel and, without knowing it, gave away the traveler’s identity.  The mother hanged herself.  The sister threw herself down a well” (76)

                “I can’t say what distinguished one from another.  I had just one impression:  I was sitting across from a row of seats on a streetcar and all these anonymous passengers were looking over the new arrival to see if they could find something funny about him” (80)

                “And they will conclude that a stranger may offer a cup of coffee, but beside the body of the one who brought him into the world, a son should have refused it” (87)

                “Here we have a perfect reflection of this entire trial:  everything is true and nothing is true!” (88)

                “I couldn’t quite understand how an ordinary man’s good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man” (96)

                “… the emptiness of a man’s heart becomes… an abyss threatening to swallow up society” (97)

                “What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was.  Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet” (104)

                “I just couldn’t accept such arrogant certainty” (104)

                “there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in” (105)

                “But everybody knows life isn’t worth living.  Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living – and for thousands of years.  In fact, nothing could be clearer.  Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying” (108)

                “Since we’re going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter” (109)

                “Have you no hope at all?  And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?’  ‘yes,’ I said.  Then he lowered his head and sat back down.  He told me that he pitied me.  He thought it was more than a man could bear” (112)

                “Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that.  I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish.  But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness” (113)

                “I know that at one time or another you’ve wished for another life” (114)

                “…he stopped me and wanted to know how I pictured this other life.  Then I shouted at him, ‘One where I could remember this life!’” (114)

                “He seemed so certain about everything, didn’t he?  And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head.  He wasn’t even sure he was live, because he was living like a dead man” (114)

                “Everybody was privileged.  There were only privileged people.  The others would all be condemned one day” (115)

                “I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a ‘fiancé,’ why she had played at beginning again” (116)

                “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.  Finding it so much like myself – so like a brother, really – I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again” (116-117)

                “For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate” (117)