Literary Works That Shape Our World: A Critical Analysis - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Analysis of “The Stranger” by Albert Camus

Meursault Is Not Deep, and That’s the Point: A Real-Time Reckoning with Camus’ The Stranger

There’s a moment about halfway through The Stranger where you realize Meursault isn’t going to change. Or maybe he already has, and the change is so microscopic—so boring—you missed it. Either way, the existential dread creeps in sideways, like the heat Camus keeps hammering at, like the sun is a prison guard and your life is the sentence.

People love to call this book a “pillar of existentialism.” People love to say that Meursault is a symbol of alienation. People love to be wrong in slightly boring ways. Because yes, The Stranger is about meaninglessness, but it’s not interested in dressing that up with tragedy or grandeur or even proper character development. This is the kind of novel where a man kills another man on a beach because the sun was “too much.” And you’re supposed to take that seriously. And, weirdly, you do.

Camus called it l’absurde—not quite nihilism, not quite existentialism. Absurdism, in the Camusian sense, is about the conflict between the human need for order and the raw indifference of the universe. Think of it like shouting into a void and getting nothing back—not even an echo. But instead of despair, Camus gives us a shrug. Not cold, not edgy. Just... a shrug. Meursault is that shrug, personified.

You probably read The Stranger in high school, or maybe in a college class with bad lighting and too many cold brew-toting guys named Theo. But reading it now—at whatever real age you are—it hits differently. There’s something seductive about the simplicity, the flatness. Meursault narrates like he’s reading a grocery list off a Post-it: “Mother died. Funeral was hot. Walked a lot.” The tone is anti-style, aggressively uninterested in pleasing you. Like a Tinder match that ghosted you, but you're still checking their last message just to double-check they really didn’t say anything deeper.

The Desert Is a Mirror

Let’s talk about Algeria. Because you can’t—shouldn’t—read The Stranger without sitting in the sunburned heat of its setting. Camus, born in French Algeria, never really interrogated the colonial backdrop of his novel. It’s just there, looming. Meursault lives in a colonized land, speaks French, walks among Arabs, and eventually kills one of them—a nameless one, at that. (Let that sink in. The murdered man is never given a name. He’s just “the Arab.”)

And what does Meursault feel about that? Nothing. He says it himself—he doesn't regret it. He’s more preoccupied with how the sun was in his eyes. And you want to scream at him: Are you serious? But that’s the thing—he is. Deadly so.

This absence of guilt, of even basic curiosity, isn't a failure of Camus’s moral imagination; it’s the core of the book’s existential bite. Absurdism doesn’t apologize. It doesn’t moralize. It lets things be ugly and flat and brutal and then stares at them until they dissolve into abstraction.

But still—French colonialism in Algeria is the invisible ink in this novel. It’s all over the place, even when Camus refuses to look directly at it. The police don’t care about the dead Arab. The trial isn’t about the murder, really—it’s about whether Meursault is “normal.” Whether he cried at his mother’s funeral. Whether he believes in God. The man’s crime isn’t murder; it’s emotional misalignment.

Which, if you think about it, is the most French literary vibe possible.

The Banality of Symbolism (Which Is Kind of the Point)

If you want symbols, they’re there. The sun is oppressive. The courtroom is a circus. The beach is purgatory. Cigarettes are tiny rebellions. But to analyze them like a schoolteacher with a red pen feels… wrong. Camus isn’t building an intricate web of meaning; he’s dismantling the whole idea that meaning should exist in the first place.

And still—the imagery hits. The white-hot light, the sweat, the salt in the mouth, the metallic clang of the gun—everything is tactile and too much. It’s a novel that feels like a headache. Or a panic attack that never peaks. You keep thinking: Something has to give. But it doesn’t.

Meursault remains inert, even when condemned to die. Especially then. That’s what makes him terrifying—he doesn’t break. He accepts. And in Camus’s eyes, that’s heroic. Or at least, it’s honest. Because to rage against the absurd is to still believe it can be beaten. Meursault just… doesn’t.

And I get it. I really do. There are days when the only reasonable response to the news cycle, the climate crisis, your rent going up again, is to light a cigarette and stare at the wall like you’ve just killed a man and it didn’t change your pulse.

Camus, Not Kierkegaard

Camus never actually identified as an existentialist, by the way. That was Sartre’s crowd. Camus had beef with that whole camp, especially the ones who thought meaning could be self-constructed. He wasn’t interested in freedom as a mystical concept. He was interested in sunlight, and death, and how people fold under time’s pressure.

So when people call The Stranger a “portrait of existential freedom,” what they’re really doing is retrofitting Camus into a philosophy he wasn’t fully on board with. Camus isn’t offering escape routes. He’s locking the door and describing the wallpaper.

And Meursault isn’t a rebel. He’s not cool. He’s not even particularly introspective. He’s just honest. Painfully, brutally, abrasively honest. The kind of honesty that gets you fired, or dumped, or executed.

That’s why the ending hits so hard. Not because it’s tragic (it isn’t), but because it dares you to be okay with it. Meursault, facing death, embraces the indifference of the universe like it’s an old friend. He doesn’t flinch. He opens his arms.

It’s so alien, it almost feels inhuman.

The Afterlife of a Flat Character

The critical legacy of The Stranger is messy in the best way. Some call it a masterpiece of philosophical fiction. Others see it as a moral void. And then there are the postcolonial critiques—very fair, very overdue—arguing that the novel’s indifference to Algerian life is emblematic of French literary elitism at large. They’re not wrong. This is not a book that cares about Arabs. It's not a book that cares about women, either, or class, or justice.

It is, however, a book that cares about the sun.

Which sounds like a joke, but is actually the emotional core of the thing. Because if meaning doesn’t come from God or society or love or legacy, then maybe it comes from how light falls on a tiled floor. Or how cold a glass of water feels when you’re dehydrated and angry and alive.

There’s something radical in that. A tenderness hidden inside all that disaffection.

Of course, critics have made careers out of finding those threads—Camus as humanist, Camus as colonial apologist, Camus as emo king of the void. The discourse won’t end anytime soon. And neither will the reissues.

What Stays With You (and What Doesn’t)

Here’s what I keep thinking about: Meursault sitting in his cell, thinking about how he wasted his life and not feeling bad about it. The utter silence between thought and feeling. The way Camus describes a man accepting death like it’s just another day at the office.

It’s not emotionally satisfying. It doesn’t teach you a lesson. It doesn’t even offer catharsis. But it does something rarer: it holds up a mirror you can’t look away from.

Because the scariest part of The Stranger isn’t Meursault’s detachment. It’s how much of it you recognize in yourself.