Stylistically, the book is excellent. Impassive, strikingly short statements of the first-person narrator reveal Mersault’s understanding of the world and the world itself better than any omniscient narrator could (e.g. what could describe a person better than: “Over his bed he has a pink-and-white plaster angel, some pictures of famous athletes, and two or three photographs of naked women.” ?)
Through Mersault, Camus autopsies a candid case of the paralysis of emotion, that far more people experience than are prepared to admit: “It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing has changed.(p.24) … I probably did love Maman, but that didn’t mean anything. At one time or anther all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead. Here the lawyer interrupted me and he seemed very upset.(p.65)” The horror of onlookers at Mersault’s trial, therefore, appears exceedingly hypocritical. Mersault is an exaggeration of the choiceless existence that many lead unawares, the existence of wood chips swaying in the waves of circumstances. Thus, in retrospect, the phrase: “It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot” is one of the novel’s messages, a much less obvious one than it seems. Following the verdict, Mersault’s musings about the nature of capital punishment and the lack of even infinitesimal hope is, in content, nearly identical to the passage in the opening pages of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot”, but completely opposed to it in feeling.
“The Stranger” is not a pessimistic statement about the state of the world, but rather a reminder to preserve the tenderness of heart and the precision of perspective, that would allow us to distinguish what really is so important in life to make one desperate to retain it.
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