“Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn’t much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.”
― Albert Camus, “The Stranger”
“The Stranger” is the winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature and was originally written in French. A surprisingly quick read that is manageable to finish within a day, “The Stranger”’ held deep meaning within a simple storyline.
“The Stranger” follows a normal man named Monsieur Meursault through his daily life, after losing his mother. We meet his girlfriend and pal as well as other folks living in the same building as himself. Then, the plotline takes a sudden dip and suddenly everything changes for Meursault.
Can a simple man justify his actions? Can a sudden impulse be the death of him?
As Albert Camus journeys into the simplicities and complexities that are human nature, Camus identifies absurdism among other things. I recommend this classic to anyone willing to deal with the philosophy of absurdism.
