Why did camus write the stranger

In this particular case, the bizarre feeling a son has for his mother constitutes his entire sensibility.

Not that The Stranger is an autobiographical novel. Camus was a much more fun-loving, animated fellow than his narrator, Meursault. Kaplan shows how The Stranger appeared to Camus slowly over a number of years. He had already published two books, with very small print runs, and then written a novel called A Happy Death , which comprised many of the same elements as The Stranger.

Camus tried to cram his whole life into it and it was too packed with material to be effective. But while he was writing it, and also becoming a journalist in Algiers, snippets of another story kept arising disconnectedly in his notebooks. He had studied philosophy under the direction of Jean Grenier, his first mentor, and was now learning the journalistic trade under the guidance of his second mentor, Pascal Pia.

When the selfless and energetic Pia went to Paris for work, he soon sent for Camus, who then worked as a layout man for page four of a tabloid. The manuscript of The Stranger was shuttled back and forth and in all directions before finally being published in April of Camus, meanwhile, because of a recurrence of tuberculosis, had returned to Algeria.

When he made it back to France, he joined the Resistance by writing and editing for the underground newspaper, Combat. Later, on a beach much like Bouisseville, Meursault encounters an Arab with a knife and shoots him to death for no other apparent reason than the unnerving brightness and heat. The sun that drove Meursault to distraction, then murder, is today buried behind a heavy cloud cover, typical of the Mediterranean winter.

Trash covers the curving sweep of sand, a faint odor of urine is in the air and the beachfront is lined with dilapidated French villas, many abandoned. He directs us down the beach toward a trickle of raw sewage flowing into the sea. The Stranger was published in , to ecstatic reviews. It earned the respect of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Left Bank philosopher with whom Camus soon formed a tempestuous friendship.

In , fifteen-year-old Olivier Todd found a dog-eared copy in the cupboard of a Jewish woman who had lent Todd and his mother her apartment in occupied Paris after she had fled the Nazis. In March , unemployed in Algeria, Camus had gone into exile in France, arriving on the eve of the Nazi invasion.

He found a job as a reporter for a newspaper in Lyon, a city under control of the collaborationist Vichy government. In January , he married Francine Faure, a beautiful pianist and math teacher from Oran.

But the same month, facing wartime privation, censorship and the threat of losing his job, Camus returned with his wife to Oran. Late on a January afternoon, after a six-hour drive from Algiers, I arrive in Oran, a city of one and a half million near the Moroccan border. The narrow street where Camus and Francine lived during his Algerian interlude is lined in faded-white buildings. Camus often whiled away the hours at the nearby Brasserie la Cintra on an avenue flanked by date palms.

Camus was unemployed, debilitated by tuberculosis and appalled by the surge of anti-Semitism under the Vichy regime. More than , Algerian Jews lost their French citizenship. But, says Todd, Camus also found much to love about the city. Camus lived with Francine in Oran for 18 months.

In August , they traveled back to France, where Camus recuperated in the mountains from a relapse of tuberculosis. Francine returned to Algeria and Camus planned to join her. Outraged by the Nazi occupation, he became editor in chief of the resistance newspaper Combat. It was dangerous work: Camus had one close call in , when he was stopped by the Gestapo and managed to dispose of a layout copy of the paper before being searched.

Some ideas in The Stranger clearly resemble this working definition of existentialism, but the broader philosophy of existentialism includes aspects far beyond this definition that are not present in The Stranger.

Hence, this SparkNote approaches The Stranger from the philosophical perspective of the absurd. When reading the novel, character development, plot, and prose style demand just as much attention as the specifics of the absurd.

This SparkNote only discusses the absurd when such discussion provides insight on the text. Otherwise, the focus of this SparkNote remains on the text itself, as with any great work of literature. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Themes Motifs Symbols. It was he who translated Camus into English. The concern about the unnamed silent Arab was aired at that time in a New York Times book review. She traced the brother of the Arab, Kaddour Touil, who had been involved in that fight.

Kaddour had died but, like Camus, had spent some time at a sanatorium in the Alps, recovering from tuberculosis. It is in such moments that art and real life appear to merge in the strangest, most incandescent of ways. Kaplan packs in prodigious notes and much detail. It is of course more concerned about how The Stranger was received in the western, English-speaking world, as the book, in all its translations, served as a radical influence in the divided Cold War era across Asia and Africa.

The women are absent, as they are in The Stranger. Share your perspective on this article with a post on ScrollStack, and send it to your followers. Contribute Now. Intriguing in its contradictions The Stranger , that sparest of novels, retains its ambiguity 75 years after its publication.