L'Étranger

Étranger, L'. Novel by Albert Camus, published 1942. It is a stylistic tour de force which conveys the authentic flavour of the universe of the absurd and was important to such subsequent writers and critics as Barthes, Robbe-Grillet, and Sarraute. The narrator is Meursault, an Algerian of instinctive but undemonstrative temperament who in Part I recounts the everyday random events of his life between his mother's funeral and his own murder of an Arab on a beach. In Part 2 minor details are turned into damning evidence at his trial. The arbitrary mechanisms of the judicial system and capital punishment provoke Meursault to assert the value of life in the face of mortality.

[David Walker]