The edition on which this guide is based was translated by Matthew Ward and published in 1988. The key sentence in Meursault’s final acceptance of death has been translated in several different ways, each of which shifts the line’s meaning. Camus’ philosophy of Absurdism resembles Existentialism in many respects (both philosophies, for example, believe in the essential meaninglessness of life) but Camus was fiercely committed to human morality and dignity, ideas many Existentialists discarded.Īlternate Translations. The inadequacy of religion or logic to account for such horrors helped inspire his own philosophy of Absurdism, whose ideas are reflected throughout The Stranger.Īn Existential Novel? Though The Stranger is often categorized as an existential novel, Camus himself rejected this label. Though he fought passionately for the French Resistance against the Germans, Camus lived amidst widespread fear that the senseless horrors of World War I would be repeated. By the time he wrote The Stranger in the early 1940s, World War II had begun and the Nazi regime occupied France, where Camus had recently moved from Algeria. Born during World War I, Camus lost his father to the fighting and grew up to be an integral member of the Lost Generation.

In the wake of the war rose the Lost Generation, a group of artists who addressed the collapse of traditional structures of meaning-both secular and religious-and conveyed their sense of life’s meaninglessness.

Fought between 19, World War I introduced the world to unprecedented violence and gave rise to a new sense of disaffection and doubt, producing art very different than the art of the past.

The stranger the outsider albert camus