Notes on Albert Camus’ The Stranger

1. Notes on Albert Camus’The Stranger Mr. Cleon M. McLean AP English Ontario High School What did it matter if he existed two or twenty years? Happiness was the fact, and that he existed ---A Happy Death---

3. Existentialism • The word first appeared in 1941. It was a branch of philosophy based on the situation of the individual in an absurd or meaningless universe where humans have free will. In other words, there is nothing beyond man’s physical existence

4. Existentialism • Opposes any absolutes. Thus, naturalism’s “I think, therefore I am” (Latin: cogito, ergo sum)is rejected as the acceptance of the binding control of nature’s laws • Our feeling, our state, and our existence is one of dread and anxiety • Because each man knows that he is free and that he is the origin of his own having, possessing, creating, and existing, he is therefore in anguish, pain, and dread. No other person or agent can take this burden away from him, except time • Each man is isolated, i.e., alone with his own freedom

5. The Existentialist • Starts with experience first: he exists. Thus, because he exists, he thinks: he feels: he perceives • When the existentialist is no longer conscious of himself as being, then he feels that he is nothing. • The existentialist believes that belief is consciousness of choosing. Choice is always possible, but what is not possible is not to choose • His fulfillment can come only through the agony of choices which uphold his own self-consciousness • Because of what I am as an existentialist, I cannot stop time, except through death, suicide, insanity, alcoholism, or narcotics addictions

6. Existentialism • No man should fool himself with any hope of future success • Human existence is replete (abundant) with lack of fulfillment, emptiness, and frustration • The conviction of making choices is never one of reason, only one of intense passion: human existence is no more than passion • What counts as real is the individual's inner response to a situation which he has experienced

7. Existentialism • Man is absurd. He could escape his agony by suicide, alcoholism, protracted narcotic states, and other abnormal acts against human existence, but he avoids these. Rather, he prefers to live with his consciousness-certain only of uncertainty. He learns to accept and to live with the fact of death. He equates his constant negation as a death, or as a reduction to nothingness.

8. Existentialism vocabulary • moral: Knowing the difference between right and wrong, and choosing right. • immoral: Knowing the difference between right and wrong, and choosing wrong. • amoral: Neither moral nor immoral. • ethos: The disposition, character, or fundamental values peculiar to a specific person, people, culture, or movement • metaphysics: The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value. • ontology: the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence

9. Existentialist philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard • “I stick my finger into existence - - - it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? - - Kierkegaard, 1941

10. CAMUS AND THE ABSURD • To enter into the literary world of Albert Camus, one must realize, first off, that one is dealing with an author who does not believe in God. Major characters in Camus' fiction, therefore, can probably be expected either to disbelieve or to wrestle with the problem of belief. One's first response then, as a reader, might profitably be a brief consideration of what might happen to a character that comes to realize that there is no Divinity, no God.-What happens when he realizes that his death is final; that his joys, his disappointments, and his sufferings are brief flickers precluding an afterlife of nothingness? What changes in his daily pattern of work-eat-love-sleep must he now effect? Much like Kafka's Joseph K., the man in question has staggeringly comprehended that he is condemned to an eternal void –and because of no crime. Only because he is a part of a meaningless birth-death cycle is he doomed; the fact of death and his mortality is all. He sees, in short, The End focused on the screen of his future: the screen on which he used to project his dreams and hopes. Hope based on anything superhuman is now futile. He sees an end for him and for his fellowman. So, what then? Suicide, if all is meaningless? Or a blind return flight toward an external, though ever-silent, God?

11. DebriefingThe Stranger Albert Camus once said, “There is in the world beauty, and there are the humiliated. And we must strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful either to the one or to the other.“ • How does this belief play out in The Stranger?

12. Debriefing The Stranger • "We can sum it up in one sentence: Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests...Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments—a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason." —Albert Camus, August 8, 1945

13. Debriefing The Stranger • Theme: The irrationality of the universe. Although a work of fiction, The Stranger contains a major philosophical stance of Camus and existentialism: that individual lives and human existence in general have no rational meaning or order. The term “absurdity” describes humanity’s futile attempt to find rational order where none exists.

14. Debriefing The Stranger • Theme: The importance of the physical world. Meursault is unable to connect emotionally or socially, he is detached. Physical sensations, whether good or bad, are very important to him. They include the heat of the sun, the feel of the water or other physical elements of his surroundings, or his relationship with Marie, which is only physical.

15. Debriefing The Stranger • Symbol: the crucifix—symbolizes Christianity which opposes Meursault’s/ Camus’ world view of absurdism. Christianity conceives of a rational order based on God’s creation and direction of the world. The chaplain attempts to force Meursault to turn to God, which Meursault rejects.

16. Debriefing The Stranger • Symbol: The courtroom in part II of the novel symbolizes society as a whole. The jury sits in judgment of Meursault. The court as society symbolism is strengthened through the appearance of almost every minor character from part I of the novel as a witness in the courtroom. Furthermore, the court focuses on trying to find a logical explanation for the murder, which symbolizes humanity’s attempts to find rational explanation for the irrational events of the universe.