Classics for Beginners discussion

This thread is for discussing Part 2 of The Stranger as well as the book as a whole. Please note that there may be spoilers in this thread, so use discretion when perusing this thread.

Camus gave a speech at the Nobel ceremony. Does the speech help to understand this book and his message? http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prize...

I read his speech at the Nobel ceremony. I think I understand the thought behind the book, but I still didn't like the book at all. Meursault seemed to me to be a bore who just floated through life with the current. I didn't really care for him at all.

I found the following on Wikipedia:

"In January 1955, Camus wrote:

I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: 'In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.' I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game."

I read The Plague and really enjoyed that book but this one for me was a big let down.

I happen to love this book also, but I am not sure what it all means. It is certainly easy to read. I finished it in two days that were filled with other activities unrelated to reading.

Here is a question that I borrowed from shmoop.com: It is difficult for Meursault to explain his motivation(s) for killing the Arab. Are the reasons he cites irrational? Are they justifiable?

Camus is considered an absurdist. I wasn't sure what this philosophy was and found this definition on Wikipedia: "Absurdism is a philosophical school of thought stating that the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail (and hence are absurd) because the sheer amount of information as well as the vast realm of the unknown make total certainty impossible. As a philosophy, absurdism furthermore explores the fundamental nature of the Absurd and how individuals, once becoming conscious of the Absurd, should respond to it. The absurdist philosopher Albert Camus stated that individuals should embrace the absurd condition of human existence while also defiantly continuing to explore and search for meaning."

Does this definition help to understand the book? What do you think of this philosophy?

More questions from Shmoop.com:

1)Based on absurdity as defined in The Stranger, can an absurdist live a good, meaningful life without believing in the possibility of it rationally?
2) From an absurdist’s viewpoint, is Meursault more "free" in prison or outside of it?

Did anyone else feel that the trial was a farce? There was more interest in how Meursault acted at his mother's funeral than why he killed the Arab. There didn't seem to be any sympathy for the Arab from anybody. That seems absurd to me!

And nobody even suggested the issue of self defense. After all, a knife was flipped up at Meursault.

I agree it was absurd to worry about how he reacted at his mom's funeral but I don't think that excuses him from murdering the Arab whether it was premeditated or not.
I came away from the story convinced Meursault is a psychopath...no feelings about anyone else.

Skeetor wrote: "I agree it was absurd to worry about how he reacted at his mom's funeral but I don't think that excuses him from murdering the Arab whether it was premeditated or not.
I came away from the story co..."

I give a different assessment of Meursault in the first thread.

What you have in the first thread is interesting. I looked up and
Asperger's syndrome was first "discovered" in the 1940s and the book was published in '42. Perhaps Camus did suffer from it but I can't find it mentioned anywhere.

I did run across the interesting link below, you may find it interesting.

Link to TheCrimeReport.org

But I still don't like the book. :)

Skeetor wrote: "What you have in the first thread is interesting. I looked up and
Asperger's syndrome was first "discovered" in the 1940s and the book was published in '42. Perhaps Camus did suffer from it but I ..."

Wow! That was a great article. Amazing that others have read the book and came to the same conclusion. I thought I was proposing an original analysis.

This is the link to the history of Aspergers. It was discovered by a German before and during World War II. However, it was not officially diagnosed until the late 1980's and early 1990's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...

This book has a special place in my heart. I found it on a bookshelf in the basement when I was 12 and read it. It was the first "grown up" book I'd ever read.

I remember thinking, "Wow, a guy gets convicted for not crying at his mom's funeral and has a really mundane, anticlimactic execution. So the moral is that people are stupid, they care too much about shows of emotion, and death is meaningless. French people are weird."

I've been thinking that my pubescent brain was probably not equal to such a classic book, but maybe I did get the main idea after all.

Looks like it!

Phil wrote: "This book has a special place in my heart. I found it on a bookshelf in the basement when I was 12 and read it. It was the first "grown up" book I'd ever read.

I remember thinking, "Wow, a guy ge..."

Haha, I love this! You were a pretty advanced teenager I guess!
Skeetor, I so agree with you: I didn't like the book and I didn't like the guy. He seems to have no empathy at all (not only for the Arab but also for this woman he dates, I forgot her name) and so I developed zero empathy for him. That might be a harsh judgement and I guess in real life I would have somewhat more differntiated feelings but for a book that is the case.

I really liked Holls remark in the first thread about Camus's mother being deaf. I found that a really interesting insight. What do you think about it?

I just realized that the book title is translated as both 'The Stranger' as well as 'The Outsider' in English. I found that an interesting realization as my first association with the French 'L'étranger' was Always 'The Foreigner', which I always found odd. Even if Meursault is - assumedly - French-Algerian (at least, I assume this because of how his life is described and because he always refers the 'The Arab' - so evidently, he is not Arab), he is not really a foreigner. Even 'The Stranger' seems only semi-fitting but 'The Outsider' seems like the most adequate translation to me.

This is an interesting discussion on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Finished last week. Good writing, but not sure what I think of it. It is ridiculous how the outcome of the trial is based entirely on his reaction to his mother's death, not on what he actually did to be on trial. People grieve in different ways, and just because someone doesn't cry at the service, doesn't mean they don't care.

Heather L wrote: "Finished last week. Good writing, but not sure what I think of it. It is ridiculous how the outcome of the trial is based entirely on his reaction to his mother's death, not on what he actually did..."

I agree. I was also troubled by the fact that no one was really concerned about the dead Arab. Meursault wasn't convicted because he killed someone, but because he didn't seem to mourn his mother's death.

I'm just finishing the book now (a bit late, yes). Regarding the complete lack of interest in the victim, I think it's also interesting to note that Raymond's "mistress", the victim's sister, was also quite faceless. What do we know about her? Only what Raymond told Meursault, and he's hardly what you'd call a reliable narrator.

At the time Camus was writing, the native Arab population were treated very badly by the French colonialists and I can well believe that the dehumanisation that Camus is describing here was par for the course at the time. In fact Irish writer Conor Cruise O'Brien notes in his critique of Camus' works that the trial is “a myth, the myth of French Algeria. No court of law in French Algeria would have condemned a European to death for shooting an Arab… [and] by suggesting that the court is impartial between Arab and Frenchman, the novel implicitly denies the colonial reality” of the country.

Smithsonian magazine interviewed Olivier Todd who was the friend and biographer of Camus, and added this little snippet on the inspiration for the book:

One summer afternoon in 1939, on Bouisseville Beach, just west of Oran, an acquaintance of Camus’, Raoul Bensoussan, had a run-in with two Arabs who, he believed, had insulted his girlfriend. “Raoul returned with his brother to argue with the Arabs, and after a brawl he was injured by one of them, who had a knife,” Todd writes in his biography. Raoul came back armed with a small-caliber pistol, but the Arabs were arrested before he could pull the trigger.

(Smithsonian article source)

One other thing I notice from that Smithsonian article is that it quotes an essay written by Camus in 1936:

my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean... the summer evenings that I love so much, so gentle in the green light and full of young and beautiful women.

Meursault mentions the sky being green in Part 1, when he's happy. It's a baffling line that I can't make sense of at all, and seeing that Camus used it elsewhere shows that it's not just a Meursault-ism. I wonder why he uses green in this way.

Holls wrote: "One other thing I notice from that Smithsonian article is that it quotes an essay written by Camus in 1936:

my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean... the summer evenings that I love so muc..."

Perhaps, there is a green light at dusk in Algeria that represents the peace and calmness of a day passing away. I feel that way about sunrises and sunsets.