The Stranger Summary | Chapterly
The Stranger by Albert Camus: A Complete Summary "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure." Overview The Stranger (L'Étranger, 1942) opens with what may be the most famous first line in twentieth-century fiction, and that opening tells you everything you need to know about its narrator. Meursault is a French-Algerian clerk who seems incapable of the emotional responses society demands. He does not cry at his mother's funeral. He begins a casual love affair the next day. He agrees to help a neighbor of dubious character. And then, on a sun-drenched beach outside Algiers, he shoots and kills an Arab man -- for no clear reason at all. Albert Camus wrote The Stranger as the fictional companion to his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, both published in 1942. Together, they form the foundation of absurdism: the philosophy that human beings search for meaning in a universe that offers none. The Stranger is not primarily a novel about murder. It is a novel about what happens when a person refuses to lie -- to himself or to others -- about the fundamental indifference of existence. The novel is short (barely 120 pages in most translations), written in...