The Stranger
A man buries his mother, kills an Arab on a beach, and faces a court that wants him to lie about both. Camus's clearest account of the absurd.
Summary
The famous opening line, "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure," establishes everything that follows. Meursault is not a monster; he is simply unwilling to pretend to feel emotions he does not feel. He finds his mother's funeral hot and physically exhausting. He sees his girlfriend's affection as pleasant. He experiences the killing on the beach as an overwhelming sensory collision with the sun and glare. The legal system cannot parse this indifference. The trial spends more energy on his lack of tears at the funeral than on the mechanics of the homicide.
Camus makes absurdism concrete through a protagonist so honest that he rejects the small social performances society treats as mandatory. Society retaliates by labeling him a monster. By the final chapters he accepts his own death without deception, guilt, or theological comfort.
It is a short book. Meursault's detachment is uncomfortable at first, and then the discomfort moves: he is the only person in the courtroom not performing, and he is convicted for it.
Quotes
"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure."
"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
"Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter."
"I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so?"
Why it stayed with me
I reread it after studying psychology, and the urge to diagnose Meursault misses Camus's point. What isolates him is his refusal to wear the social mask everyone else puts on without thinking.
The book builds to the prison cell scene from its first sentence, and that scene is where the argument for living without illusion actually gets made.