Stranger

Albert Camus's The Stranger is narrated by Meursault, a clerk living in French colonial Algiers. The novel begins with news of his mother's death and follows his trip to the care home, the funeral, and his return to ordinary routines. Meursault records heat, light, bodily sensation, work, and companionship with unusual directness, offering little of the emotion that other people expect him to display.

His relationship with Marie and his involvement with his neighbor Raymond draw him toward a conflict on an Algerian beach. A sudden act of violence divides the book's movement: afterward, legal judgment focuses not only on what happened but on Meursault's conduct before it, especially his response to mourning. The courtroom turns private gestures into evidence of character.

The Stranger is most clearly read by separating Meursault's plain descriptive voice from the moral conclusions made about him. Camus connects social convention, physical circumstance, alienation, and the problem of meaning without giving the narrator a simple doctrine. This account identifies the funeral, relationships, and beach conflict but leaves the trial's outcome and Meursault's final confrontation with mortality undisclosed.