Omar Azam
Book Review
2004
The Stranger, by Albert Camus
This is a very important book to read and to understand in order to understnad the depths of the human condition. Ironically, it is about a sort of loneliness that occurs when man loses his humanity and becomes an object through the sin of objectifying others.
Though my views on life and God are radically different than the author's, the author's narrative is compelling because his opinions do not spell themselves out until the very end. Instead, the writer takes a quasi-objective approach in which he explains the world purely from the point of the view of the protagonist. And from this we learn about the pscyhology of the narrator. This protagonist, who because he often sees the world as starkly separate from himself, often describes it in very objective terms. So we learn that not only is the author trying to be objective and action-oriented, but that the narrator himself has an eerily superficial understanding of humanity and indeed all relationships, most crucially the one with the universe and with God Itself. As we come to understand the manner the author writes about the world, his language reveals the way the protagonist thinks about the world.
Merseult is a very interesting protagonist, unlike the ones I typically encounter. This is a protagonist who lives by his senses and his egotism alone. The portrait is not overly sympathetic or critical, but lets me draw my own conclusions. By the end of the book, though I could understand the protagonist, I felt sorry for his lonely existence. I interpreted the title as an allusion to his standing in the world. Because he was so aloof to all the humanity in the world (demonstrated by his capacity to murder without regret), he was truly a "stranger" to it. Notably, this aloofness is traditionally viewed by the author as something to aspire to. Historically, this book is as good as any other when trying to understand the numbing of humanity vis a vis violence that characerized the first half of the twentieth century Europe.
Copyright 2004 Omar Azam