Alienation Embraced: Camus’s The Stranger

Abstract

Nietzsche claimed that Western man had killed the idea of God, and described the fateful consequences of this cultural murder. ‘Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing?’ Camus’s Stranger is one of those men who, with the departure of God, are fluttering in the void. When deprived of firm and familiar guidance, man easily loses his bearings. He does not know what to do with himself or what gives his life meaning. In the character of Meursault Camus captures in a convincing way a phenomenon to which many representatives of our age have repeatedly called attention. When the spiritual and cultural fabric of a civilisation falls apart, it should not be surprising to find a vacuum in the soul of man. Indeed, the very presence of the soul may be put in doubt. When the prosecutor in Meursault’s trial considers the defendant’s soul, he finds a blank, ‘literally nothing, gentlemen of the jury’. As Meursault reports, ‘Really, he said, I have no soul, there was nothing human about me, not one of those moral qualities which normal men possess had any place in my mentality.’