Critical Overview of Camus’ The Stranger

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Daoud’s hero has a manifest horror of the absurd; he wants to replace a narrative that relates the absurdity of the human condition with a meta-report that revolts against this absurdity. However, as Sartre says: ‘The stranger is a leaf of his life. And since the most absurd life must be the most sterile life, his novel wants to be magnificently sterile. Art is an unnecessary generosity’. However, Daoud’s book is a narrative that explains and is clear. In fact, The Stranger of Camus is a novel that renounces the logic of the story and its linearity. It is deliberately intended to be ambiguous, by reporting the facts as they are, i. e. raw and without any intelligible relationship. Sartre said in this regard: ‘The novel remained rather ambiguous: how should one understand this character, who, after his mother’s death, ‘took baths, began an irregular affair and would laugh at a comedy film’, who killed an Arab ‘because of the sun’ and who, on the eve of his capital execution, affirming that he ‘had been and still was happy’, wanted many spectators around the scaffold to ‘welcome him with cries of hatred’? Some said: ‘He’s a fool, poor guy’; others better inspired: ‘He’s an innocent man’.

Meursault’s life is a series of unrelated actions that can impose meaning. But Meursault’s reader, counter-investigation, is ready to understand the crime of Haroun and his mother and forgive them, even if this abject act draws its legitimacy from a fiction, from a discursive universe.

Indeed, it is Camus’ book that failed to mention his brother’s name that is absurd and not the world of Haroun. In The Stranger: the word ‘Arabian’ is revealed twenty-five times. This is inconceivable, unacceptable, and unfair to Haroun. It is an error that must be corrected to put an end to Meursault’s ambiguity and dissolve the absurd in a plot of another story that will take care to substitute the causal order for the chronological order in order to put an end to the contingency of the real world and finally to give meaning to the succession of actions and events over time.

Outside the universe of The Stranger, Haroun is a stranger. Daoud introduced it into the history of this book only to put an end to absurdity. Because Daoud knows the end of the history of the stranger and that of Haroun, that is, the last event; he succumbed to the ease of teleological vision to write his story. It is not by chance that he chose to tell the story of Haroun starting at the end. He says: “this is not a normal story”. It is a story taken from the end and that goes back to the beginning’. Finally, Daoud’s narrator is lost between two worlds, his own and the one created by the narrator of The Stranger.

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