This work is a fascinating sample of existential writing and revolutionary philosophy, in the guise of absurdist, dark comedy. We get a sense that there’s something a bit off about the character very early on - he doesn’t even want to see his recently departed mother before she is buried! - and he only gets stranger as time goes on and he gets mixed up with a sleazy neighbor and winds up killing a man.

Probably, it would have been awesome to read this book in the original French; as I understand it was written in passé composé, and not passé as was typical in literature at the time. (Or then again, maybe I would not have even noticed, since I don’t think I ever learned passé simple in high school French.) Alas, it was the English version I read.

And as far as that goes: I do appreciate, in a fashion, the narrator’s transgressive attitude towards the society that engulfs him, and the way he seems to stand just on the edge of time. (Which, I suppose, does make the use of passé composé kind of interesting.) Then, again, there is his curiously anti-emotional pose, a state of feeling that has more to do with temperature than the events of the world around him, and one that is unaffected until it’s suddenly upended in a burst of sentimentality and rage as his final day approaches. It’s difficult to know what to make of Mersault: he represents, I suppose, a kind of unembellished, honest human nature, the kind which is unimpressed with social norms and institutions.

In that light, perhaps the story is altogether depressing: after all, Mersault is also kind of a bigoted, sexist jerk who lacks any feeling for his victims. Perhaps that is a somewhat modern take on the events of The Stranger, but I don’t think by far. To be sure, social institutions do not come off all that well here, but this is not a revolutionary tract in the style of, say, The Jungle: we’re not really meant to take the side of the hero as he struggles against his oppressors. I think, instead, we’re meant to struggle with the brutality of society as it stands opposed to honesty (because whatever else you may say about Mersault, he is certainly honest), and I think we are meant, also, to struggle with what it means to be brutally honest ourselves.