A Review of The Stranger by Albert Camus
It has been perhaps three years since I've read The Stranger, but the book left an indelible impression on me. The reason, I think, is that this under appreciated work addresses the most profound question of our times: the question of the narcissistic and anti-social personality disorders and their challenge to civilization. Beyond a doubt this was the question Camus was addressing here, and he was doing so long before these issues were in the forefront of psychological thought.
In his seemingly casual anticipation of the significance of these conditions and his realistic interpretation of their banal nature lies the work's misleadingly prosaic quality; yet under that seemingly tepid surface lies the horror of the human spirit disconnected from love.
This, along with the crystal clear prose that always characterized Camus, resulted in an understated novel that is a triumph of Western Literature.
Whatever our interpretation of the origins of these mental conditions, or our understanding of their meanings - whether it is the result of overpopulation, or of individualism vs. the collective good, or of simple genetics, or of some other factor - there is no doubt that this is the great question of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Hitler to Ghandi, from spirituality to science, from plutocracy to democracy, from frugality to materialism: human nature itself is the catalyist and human nature comes down to the individual.
Within this mystery of the individual, as much as that of society itself, lies the origin of the two world wars and all of the subsequent strife of the hyper-material age. We are trapped in a duality between survival and connection, between selfishness and transcendence, between life and death.
That "The Stranger" can be completely unmoved at his own mother's funeral, that he can exist isolated from any emotional connection and that he can eventually be led to murder without any more effort than a child is led to candy is the profound message of this novel. It is a condemnation of our increasing isolation from one another, from community, and from spirituality. It is a clarion call alerting us that an individualistic, impersonal, hyper-technical society not only produces these people, but perhaps even encourages them, and at times elevates them to positions of great power.
With the second world war in clear hindsight it was this towering quandary that clearly absorbed Camus in this work, and there is no more important question for a current reader to engage.
And so, seen in it's proper light, "the Stranger" is a riveting story of loveless alienation, spiritual meaninglessness, and of the inability of the individual to even understand what they are missing - the kind of existence that resulted in a Nazi Germany or a Soviet Russia, and of it's consequences. We must not allow our distance from this work in space and time to obscure the fact that it is still the central question of today. That was the gift Camus gave to us in The Stranger, and we should receive it with gratitude.
Brent Hightower
Copyright 2012 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com
