The Stranger
Albert Camus (1942)
“A man kills someone he barely knows, feels nothing, and goes to the guillotine refusing to pretend otherwise — and somehow becomes the most honest person in the room.”
Character Analysis
A French Algerian clerk who exists entirely in the present tense, reports experience without interpreting it, and cannot produce the emotional performances society requires. He is not cold — he loves the sea, the sun, Marie's body, cigarettes, the feel of particular moments. But he cannot translate feeling into the social currency of emotion. At trial he is destroyed not for killing an Arab but for being the kind of man who didn't cry at his mother's funeral. His final outburst at the chaplain is the novel's only evidence that he can feel passionately — and what he feels passionately about is the right to be uncertain.
Flat, affectless, paratactic. No social performance in his language — no formulas of politeness, no register-shifting for authority figures. Same tone with his boss, his lover, the magistrate, the chaplain.