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Albert Camus' The Stranger1 is one of the most prominent post-1939 French novels, and one which has been widely regarded as conveying a new “philosophical” message. This paper is not concerned with the connections between the novel and the philosophic writings of the author (in particular Le mythe de Sisyphe, 1942). It attempts to trace relationships between the novel and certain trends in the temper of the age. In doing so, it offers a psychological interpretation of the content of the novel2 and confronts this interpretation with those of a sample of American critics2 3.
The outline of the plot is as follows: Meursault, a small French clerk in Algiers, receives news of his mother's death; he attends her funeral; he begins an affair and becomes engaged; he kills, under a blazing sun, without any adequate conscious motivation the brother of an Arab prostitute whose pimp he vaguely knows; he is condemned to death and wil presently be executed. He is the narrator.