The Stranger by Camus Explained

The Stranger, published in 1942, is a short novel that has disturbed and fascinated readers for over eighty years. It is assigned in high school classrooms and debated in graduate seminars. It has been called a masterpiece and a moral outrage.

The book tells a simple story. A man attends his mother's funeral, begins a relationship with a woman, and kills an Arab on a beach. He is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The plot could fit on an index card.

But the simplicity is deceptive. The Stranger is not really about murder or punishment. It is about what happens when a man refuses to lie about his feelings, and what society does to people who will not play along with its rituals.

The Plot

Meursault is a French Algerian clerk living in Algiers. The novel opens with him receiving a telegram informing him that his mother has died at the nursing home where he placed her. He travels to the home, sits vigil with the body, and attends the funeral. He does not cry. He smokes cigarettes. He drinks coffee. He notices the heat.

The day after the funeral, Meursault goes to the beach. He runs into Marie, a former colleague. They swim together, watch a comedy film, and begin a sexual relationship. When Marie asks if he loves her, Meursault says he supposes not. When she asks if he wants to marry her, he says it does not matter to him but he will if she wants.

Meursault becomes involved with his neighbor Raymond, a man of questionable reputation who is having trouble with his girlfriend. Raymond asks Meursault to write a letter to lure the woman back so Raymond can humiliate her. Meursault agrees. He has no strong feelings about it either way.

The situation with the girlfriend escalates. Her brother and his friends begin following Raymond. One Sunday, Meursault, Marie, and Raymond go to a beach house owned by Raymond's friend. The Arab men appear. There is a confrontation. Raymond is cut with a knife.

Later, Meursault walks back along the beach alone. He encounters one of the Arab men lying near a spring. The sun is blinding. The heat is oppressive. The Arab draws his knife, and the light reflects off the blade. Meursault has Raymond's gun. He fires once, killing the man. Then, for reasons he cannot explain, he fires four more times into the body.

The second half of the novel covers Meursault's imprisonment and trial. The prosecutor builds his case not primarily around the murder but around Meursault's character. He did not cry at his mother's funeral. He smoked cigarettes beside her coffin. He went to the beach and started a romance the next day. He cannot say that he regrets killing the Arab.

The prosecutor calls Meursault a monster without human feelings. The jury agrees. Meursault is convicted and sentenced to death by guillotine.

In his cell awaiting execution, Meursault finally confronts his situation. A chaplain visits, urging him to turn to God. Meursault refuses. He erupts in anger, grabbing the chaplain and shouting that nothing matters, that the chaplain's certainties are worthless, that everyone is condemned to die and no one's life matters more than another's.

After this outburst, Meursault finds peace. He opens himself to "the gentle indifference of the world." He realizes he has been happy and is happy still. His only remaining wish is that a crowd of spectators greet his execution with cries of hatred, confirming his alienation from the society that is about to kill him.

The Famous First Line

"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

This opening has been analyzed endlessly. It establishes everything that follows.

The uncertainty about the day is not callousness. It reflects Meursault's honesty. He received a telegram that said the funeral would be tomorrow. He does not know exactly when she died. Rather than pretend to certainty he does not have, he admits his ignorance.

But the tone is what shocks readers. A son reporting his mother's death should express grief, loss, devastation. Meursault reports it as a fact, like the weather. The sentence has no emotional coloring.

This is not because Meursault lacks feelings. Throughout the novel, he experiences physical sensations intensely. The sun, the sea, Marie's body, the taste of coffee. What he lacks is the instinct to perform emotions according to social expectations. He feels what he feels when he feels it. He does not manufacture feelings because the situation demands them.

The first line tells us we are in the presence of someone who will not lie about his inner life. Society will make him pay for this honesty.

Meursault as a Character

Readers often ask whether Meursault is a psychopath, a nihilist, or simply depressed. None of these labels quite fit.

Meursault is radically present-focused. He lives in the immediate moment, responding to physical sensations and circumstances without filtering them through social narratives. When he is hot, he notices the heat. When he is tired, he sleeps. When Marie's body is next to him, he desires her. He does not think about what these sensations mean or what he should feel about them.

This makes him strangely passive. He agrees to write the letter for Raymond not because he approves of the plan but because he has no reason to refuse. He agrees to marry Marie not because he loves her but because she wants to and he does not care either way. He drifts through life without goals, projects, or ambitions.

But passivity is not the same as emptiness. Meursault experiences the world with unusual intensity. His descriptions of the beach, the sun, the sea, and the physical pleasures of existence are vivid and sensual. He is fully alive in his body even if he seems disconnected from social life.

What Meursault cannot do is translate his experiences into the narratives society demands. He cannot say he loved his mother the way a son should. He cannot pretend to remorse he does not feel. He cannot claim that killing the Arab was part of some meaningful story rather than a senseless act triggered by the sun.

Camus called Meursault "the only Christ we deserve." He meant that Meursault dies for refusing to lie. Society cannot tolerate someone who will not participate in its rituals of meaning-making. So it kills him.

The Murder on the Beach

The killing of the Arab is the center of the novel, but Camus makes it strangely motiveless.

Meursault does not kill out of hatred, revenge, or self-defense. The Arab has done nothing to him directly. The confrontation with Raymond is over. Meursault walks back to the beach alone, seeking shade and relief from the heat.

When he encounters the Arab, his description focuses entirely on physical sensations. The blinding sun. The sweat in his eyes. The glare off the knife. The pressure of the heat. He does not think about the man as a person with a life. He barely registers him as human.

When he fires, he describes it as if the trigger pulled itself, as if the shot were caused by the sun rather than his will. And then, incomprehensibly, he fires four more shots into the body.

Those four extra shots are crucial. The first shot might be explained as instinct or accident. The four that follow cannot be. They represent something Meursault himself cannot understand or explain.

Camus never provides a psychological explanation. The murder remains absurd in the philosophical sense. It has no meaning, no reason, no narrative that makes sense of it. It simply happens.

This is the point. The universe does not organize itself into meaningful stories. Things happen. We search for reasons and find none. Meursault's crime is senseless because existence itself is senseless.

The Trial

The second half of the novel exposes the machinery society uses to create meaning.

Meursault is tried for murder, but the prosecutor spends more time on his behavior at his mother's funeral than on the killing itself. He smoked cigarettes. He drank coffee with milk. He did not cry. He went to the beach the next day and started a relationship with a woman.

The prosecutor weaves these facts into a story. Meursault is a man without feelings, without morality, without human connection. His failure to grieve properly reveals the soul of a murderer. The prosecutor asks the jury to look into Meursault's heart and see nothing there.

The defense tries to counter by telling a different story. Meursault is a hardworking, honest man. The murder was an aberration, caused by the sun or by temporary madness. He is not truly a criminal.

But Meursault will not cooperate with either narrative. He cannot claim remorse he does not feel. He cannot pretend his crime was part of a meaningful story. He sits in the courtroom feeling like a spectator at someone else's trial.

Camus is showing us how society processes the incomprehensible. A meaningless killing must be given meaning. Meursault must be transformed into a monster or a victim. The jury cannot simply say that a man killed another man for no reason. They need a story.

Meursault's real crime is not the murder. It is his refusal to provide the story society needs. He will not cry on command. He will not perform remorse. He will not pretend that his actions have the meaning society demands.

So society kills him. Not for shooting the Arab, but for being a stranger to its rituals.

The Arab

Modern readers often notice that the Arab victim has no name, no interiority, no presence in the novel beyond his death. This is troubling.

Camus was a French Algerian writing in 1942, a colonial context in which Arab lives were systematically devalued by French society. The novel reflects this. The Arab is not a character. He is a plot device, a body on a beach.

Some critics have argued that this reflects Camus's own colonial blind spots. Others have argued that it reflects Meursault's perspective, not Camus's own view. Still others suggest that the Arab's anonymity is part of the point. In a world without meaning, all deaths are equally senseless. The Arab's namelessness emphasizes the absurdity of all violence.

There is no settled answer. But any reading of The Stranger today must grapple with this question. The novel's treatment of the Arab is a problem, and how you interpret it affects how you interpret the book.

What the Novel Means

The Stranger is not a realistic psychological novel. It is a philosophical demonstration.

Camus wanted to show what happens when someone lives according to the truth of the Absurd. Meursault acts as if life has no inherent meaning, as if social rituals are arbitrary performances, as if death is final and nothing matters beyond the present moment.

Society cannot tolerate this. It needs its members to participate in shared fictions. You must act as if you love your mother, as if marriage matters, as if life has purpose. When Meursault refuses to perform these fictions, society identifies him as a threat.

The trial is not really about justice. It is about enforcing conformity. Meursault must be punished not for what he did but for what he represents. An honest man in a world that runs on lies.

But Camus does not present Meursault as a hero to be imitated. Meursault's passivity leads to violence. His indifference to the Arab's life is part of what makes the murder possible. Living without meaning is not the same as living well.

The novel asks a question without fully answering it. If the world has no inherent meaning, how should we live? Meursault's way is one possibility. It is not necessarily the right one.

The Ending

Meursault's confrontation with the chaplain is the climax of the novel.

The chaplain offers meaning, purpose, and hope. God's love. Eternal life. The possibility of redemption. Meursault rejects it all.

His explosion of anger is the most emotionally intense moment in the book. For once, Meursault feels something strongly and expresses it. He is not passive. He is furious.

What makes him furious is the chaplain's certainty. The priest claims to know things no one can know. He offers comforts that require abandoning honesty. Meursault would rather die authentically than live by pleasant lies.

After the chaplain leaves, Meursault finds peace. He accepts the indifference of the universe. He accepts his death. He realizes that he has been happy and that he can be happy even now, facing execution.

This ending is strange and difficult. Meursault has killed a man. He shows no remorse. He is about to die. And Camus asks us to see him as someone who has achieved a kind of wisdom.

The wisdom is not moral. It is not about being a good person. It is about accepting reality without illusion. Meursault sees the world as it is and does not demand that it be different. In Camus's view, this is a form of triumph.

Why The Stranger Still Matters

The Stranger endures because its questions endure.

How much of our behavior is genuine, and how much is performance? What do we owe to social rituals we do not believe in? What happens to someone who refuses to pretend?

The novel does not provide comfortable answers. Meursault is not a role model. His honesty leads to violence and death. But the society that condemns him is not admirable either. It cares more about appearances than truth, more about conformity than justice.

Between Meursault and society, Camus does not clearly choose. He shows us the collision and lets us draw our own conclusions.

If you read The Stranger and feel disturbed, that is the point. If you feel sympathy for Meursault despite his crime, that is also the point. Camus wanted to unsettle our certainties about meaning, morality, and how we judge one another.

The questions he raised are still open. We are still living with them.