Michael: Alright Kevin, we’re diving into a literary giant today. So, I’m going to put you on the spot. Give me your five-word review of Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Kevin: Oh, I love this game. Okay, my five words are: "Worst funeral guest ever, right?" Michael: That is brutally accurate. And it perfectly captures the problem. My five are: "Sun, murder, coffee, courtroom, freedom." Kevin: Wow, that’s a journey. From coffee to freedom is a big leap. But I’m stuck on my point. The book is famous, or infamous, for its main character, Meursault, and how he acts at his own mother's funeral. It’s the thing everyone remembers. Michael: It absolutely is. And we're talking about The Stranger by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, a book that’s so much more than just one man’s strange reaction to death. What's wild is that Camus wrote this masterpiece while fleeing the Nazis during World War II, literally carrying the manuscript with him as he escaped. It was then published in occupied France in 1942 and somehow, miraculously, wasn't censored. Kevin: That’s insane. A book this provocative, published under a Nazi regime? That alone tells you there’s something powerful going on here. Okay, so let's start with the funeral, because you can't talk about this book without it. What is the deal with this guy? Is he a sociopath?

Michael: That's the million-dollar question, and the book's entire first half is dedicated to making you ask it. The story opens with a telegram: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." Meursault's reaction is... nothing. He's more annoyed that he has to ask his boss for two days off. Kevin: Right, and his boss is annoyed, too. Meursault even notes that it’s not his fault, but he feels he has to apologize. He’s aware of the social script, but he just can’t bring himself to perform it. Michael: Exactly. He’s a stranger to the expected emotions. So he goes to the old people's home in Marengo. He sits in a vigil with his mother's friends, but he doesn't want to see her body. He drinks coffee, smokes a cigarette, and even dozes off. He’s not being cruel; he’s just… there. He’s observing the bright lights, the smell of the room, the physical sensations. Kevin: It’s his focus on the physical world that’s so jarring. He’s more interested in the temperature of the coffee than the fact that his mother is in a box a few feet away. So what happens after the funeral? This is where it gets even weirder. Michael: This is the key story that defines his character. He gets back to Algiers. It’s Saturday. He’s got the day off. What does he do? He decides to go for a swim. Kevin: As one does, the day after burying their mother. This is where I start to think, okay, maybe he really is a monster. Michael: And at the public swimming harbor, he bumps into a woman he used to know from his office, Marie Cardona. They swim together, they flirt. He helps her onto a raft and rests his head on her stomach. The sun feels good, the water feels good. They’re just enjoying the physical moment. Kevin: And it doesn't stop there, does it? Michael: Not at all. That evening, they go to a movie—a comedy, of all things. They kiss in the theater. And then she goes home with him and they spend the night together. The next morning, Marie is gone, and Meursault just spends his Sunday on his balcony, smoking and watching people walk by on the street below. He reflects that, really, nothing has changed. His mother is dead, but his life is the same. Kevin: Okay, hold on. So he's not sad, he's not grieving, he's not even faking it for Marie's sake. He's just… living. What is this philosophy? Is this what Camus means by "the absurd"? Michael: You've hit it exactly. Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for his work largely on the strength of this novel, wasn't just writing a story about a weird guy. He was illustrating a philosophy. The absurd is the conflict, the gap, between our profound human need to find meaning and purpose in life, and the universe's complete, silent indifference to that need. Kevin: So the universe doesn't care about our feelings, our plans, our morality. It's just a cold, physical reality. Michael: Precisely. And the "absurd man," like Meursault, is someone who has accepted this. He doesn't invent a higher purpose—not God, not love, not career—to make himself feel better. He lives truthfully in the physical world, moment by moment. When Marie asks him later if he loves her, he says, "that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I supposed I didn’t." He’s not trying to be hurtful; he’s just being honest. The concept of "love" is an abstract meaning he doesn't subscribe to. Kevin: That makes a strange kind of sense, but it also sounds incredibly dangerous. Because if nothing has meaning, what stops you from doing terrible things? Michael: And that is the trap. This is where his passivity, his moral indifference, leads him into real trouble. He has a neighbor in his apartment building, Raymond Sintès, who is known to be a pimp. One night, Raymond invites Meursault over for dinner and tells him a story about how he thinks his mistress is cheating on him. He beat her, but he wants to punish her more. Kevin: And what does he want from Meursault? Michael: He wants Meursault to write a letter for him. A letter to lure the woman back so he can humiliate her. And Meursault, without any real thought or judgment, just says okay. He writes the letter. It makes no difference to him one way or the other. Kevin: Whoa. This is where it gets really uncomfortable for me. It’s one thing to be detached from your own emotions, but it’s another thing to be a passive accomplice to someone else's cruelty. Is being 'absurd' just an excuse for being a bad person? Michael: That is the central, troubling question the book poses. His detachment isn't a superpower; it's a vulnerability. He becomes a pawn in Raymond's grubby little drama. A few days later, he hears screams from Raymond's room. Raymond is beating the woman again. The police come, and Raymond asks Meursault to be his witness and lie for him, to say the woman provoked him. And Meursault agrees. Kevin: Of course he does. Because why not? It’s all the same to him. This is setting up something terrible, I can feel it. Michael: It is. Because that woman has a brother. And Raymond's conflict is about to become Meursault's. This passive, indifferent man is about to be dragged into a violent confrontation, not because he believes in anything, but simply because he was there.

Michael: And that's the perfect pivot to the second half of the book. His passivity with Raymond leads directly to a trip to a beach house with Raymond and Marie. It's a hot, blistering Sunday. The sun is oppressive. And on the beach, they run into a group of Arab men, one of whom is the brother of Raymond's mistress. Kevin: The confrontation. Michael: A fight breaks out. Raymond gets his arm slashed with a knife. Later, things cool down, but Meursault, feeling dizzy from the heat and the wine, decides to walk back down to the beach alone to a cool spring behind a rock. And who is there, waiting? The brother. Kevin: This is the climax. The moment the whole book turns on. Michael: The sun is blinding. It's described as a "cymbals of sunlight" crashing down. The heat is a physical force. The Arab man pulls out his knife, and the light glints off the blade, stabbing at Meursault's eyes. Meursault has Raymond's gun in his pocket. He says the heat is pressing in on him, that his whole body tensed up. He fires one shot. And then, after a pause, he fires four more times into the inert body. Kevin: Four more times. That’s chilling. It’s not self-defense at that point. It’s an execution. And his reason is… the sun? Michael: "It was because of the sun," he tells the authorities. And this is where the story flips. Meursault is arrested, and the legal system tries to make sense of his crime. But they can't. So instead of trying the crime, they put the man on trial. The murder itself is almost an afterthought. Kevin: What do you mean? He shot a man. That seems pretty central. Michael: You would think! But the prosecutor realizes he can't find a motive. Meursault isn't a greedy man, or a vengeful one. So the prosecutor builds a different kind of case. He brings in witnesses from the old people's home. The warden, the doorkeeper. And he asks them about Meursault's behavior at his mother's funeral. Kevin: Hold on. They're using his coffee order against him in a murder trial? This feels like a parody. Michael: It's Camus's searing critique of society. The prosecutor tells the jury, "I accuse this man of burying his mother with a criminal's heart." He paints a picture of a soulless monster, a man who didn't cry, who smoked cigarettes, who went on a date the next day. These are his real crimes. His failure to perform the correct emotions is presented as proof that he was capable of murder. Kevin: That is terrifyingly brilliant. It’s like being judged on social media for not posting the 'right' tribute after a tragedy. The performance of emotion becomes more important than the reality. His real crime wasn't killing a man; it was not being sad about his mom. Michael: Exactly. The trial becomes a spectacle about his character. And this is where the colonial context, which critics have rightly pointed out is problematic, becomes so sharp. The victim is just "the Arab." He's nameless, faceless. His life and death are secondary. The real drama for this French colonial court is the moral character of the Frenchman, Meursault. The injustice is layered. Kevin: So the system isn't seeking truth; it's seeking a story it can understand. And "a man killed another man because the sun was in his eyes" is not a story they can accept. But "a cold-hearted monster who didn't love his own mother was bound to kill someone eventually"—that’s a story that makes sense to them. Michael: That's the absurdity of the justice system. While in prison, Meursault finds a scrap of newspaper with a story about a Czech man who leaves his village, makes a fortune, and returns 25 years later. He decides to play a trick and checks into his mother and sister's hotel without revealing his identity. They don't recognize him, but they see he's rich. So they murder him in his sleep for his money. Kevin: Oh, no. Michael: The next day, his wife shows up and reveals who he was. The mother hangs herself, and the sister throws herself into a well. Meursault reads this story over and over. He finds it both unlikely and completely natural. He concludes the man deserved it, because "one shouldn't play fool tricks." Kevin: Wow. He sees it as a story about the danger of not being authentic, of playing a role. It’s a perfect little parable for his own situation. He refused to play the role of the grieving son, and now he's going to be executed for it.

Michael: In the end, that's exactly what happens. He's found guilty and sentenced to death. The final chapter is a confrontation with the prison chaplain, who desperately wants Meursault to repent, to turn to God, to accept some form of higher meaning before he dies. Kevin: And I’m guessing Meursault is not having it. Michael: He completely rejects it. He gets angry for the first and only time in the book. He grabs the chaplain and yells at him, saying that none of the chaplain's certainties are worth "a single strand of a woman's hair." He says they are both condemned men, but the chaplain is living a lie. In that moment of rage, Meursault finds a kind of peace. Kevin: How can he find peace when he’s about to have his head chopped off? Michael: Because he finally accepts everything. He opens himself up to the world as it is. His final thought is one of the most famous lines in literature. He says he felt he understood why his mother, at the end of her life, had taken a "fiancé" and played at starting over. He says he opens himself to "the gentle indifference of the world." Kevin: "The gentle indifference of the world." That's beautiful and terrifying. He’s not fighting it anymore. He’s found a strange kind of kinship with the meaningless universe. Michael: He has. And he realizes that he had been happy, and that he was happy still. His only remaining hope is that on the day of his execution, there will be a huge crowd of spectators to greet him with "howls of execration." Kevin: He wants them to hate him? Why? Michael: Because their hate would be real. It would be an authentic human connection, confirming his existence as a stranger, an outsider. It would be the final, perfect confirmation of his absurd life. He doesn't want pity or fake sympathy. He wants the truth of their hatred. Kevin: So the big question the book leaves you with is: how much of our lives is just... performance? How often do we say or feel things because we're supposed to, not because we actually do? It’s a deeply unsettling thought. Michael: It is. It forces you to look at your own life and ask where you might be a stranger to your own truth. Camus isn't saying we should all be like Meursault—his path leads to a senseless murder. But he is challenging us to confront the absurdity of our own existence and to question the comforting lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. It's a short book that asks the biggest questions there are. Kevin: It really makes you think. For anyone listening, we'd love to hear your take. When you read this book, did you see Meursault as a hero, a monster, or something else entirely? Let us know what you think. It's a book that stays with you long after you finish it. Michael: It certainly does. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.