Salamano is an old man who routinely walks his dog. He abuses it but is still attached to it. When he loses his dog, he is distressed and asks Meursault for advice. He testifies at Meursault’s trial.
Raymond Sintès is a neighbour of Meursault who beats his Arab mistress. Her brother and friends try to take revenge. He brings Meursault into the conflict, and the latter kills the brother. Raymond and Meursault seem to develop a bond, and he testifies for Meursault during his trial.
Masson is the owner of the beach house where Raymond takes Marie and Meursault. Masson is a carefree person who likes to live his life and be happy. He testifies at Meursault’s trial.
The Arabs include Raymond’s mistress, her brother, and his assumed friends. None of the Arabs in The Stranger are named, reflecting the distance between the French colonists and native people.
The Arab (the brother of the mistress of Raymond) is a man shot and killed by Meursault on a beach in Algiers.
The Chaplain serves as a final attempt to force Meursault into following normative social scripts, in this case, seeking Christian forgiveness for his crime. The overall weakness of the Chaplain’s arguments in the face of Meursault’s complete disinterest in them emphasizes the novel’s view of religion as a limiting worldview that distracts from the truth of life’s ultimate absurdity.
Critical analysis
In his 1956 analysis of the novel, Carl Viggiani wrote:
On the surface, L’Étranger gives the appearance of being an extremely simple though carefully planned and written book. In reality, it is a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings and formal qualities. It would take a book at least the length of the novel to make a complete analysis of meaning and form and the correspondences of meaning and form, in L’Étranger.
Victor Brombert has analysed L’Étranger and Sartre’s “Explication de L’Étranger” in the philosophical context of the Absurd. Louis Hudon dismissed the characterisation of L’Étranger as an existentialist novel in his 1960 analysis. The 1963 study by Ignace Feuerlicht begins with an examination of the themes of alienation, in the sense of Meursault being a ‘stranger’ in his society. In his 1970 analysis, Leo Bersani commented that L’Étranger is “mediocre” in its attempt to be a “‘profound’ novel”, but describes the novel as an “impressive if flawed exercise in a kind of writing promoted by the New Novelists of the 1950s”. Paul P. Somers Jr. has compared Camus’s L’Étranger and Sartre’s Nausea, in light of Sartre’s essay on Camus’s novel. Sergei Hackel has explored parallels between L’Étranger and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Terry Otten has studied in detail the relationship between Meursault and his mother. Gerald Morreale examines Meursault’s killing of the Arab and the question of whether Meursault’s action is an act of murder. Ernest Simon has examined the nature of Meursault’s trial in L’Étranger, with respect to earlier analysis by Richard Weisberg and jurist Richard A. Posner. René Girard has critiqued the relative nature of ‘indifference’ in the character of Meursault in relation to his surrounding society.
Kamel Daoud has written a novel The Meursault Investigation (2013/2014), first published in Algeria in 2013, and then republished in France to critical acclaim. This post-colonialist response to The Stranger counters Camus’s version with elements from the perspective of the unnamed Arab victim’s brother (naming him and presenting him as a real person who was mourned) and other protagonists. Daoud explores their subsequent lives following the withdrawal of French authorities and most pied-noirs from Algeria after the conclusion of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962.
Publication history and English translations
Original French publication
On 27 May 1941, Camus was informed about the changes suggested by André Malraux after he had read the manuscript and took his remarks into account. For instance, Malraux thought the minimalist syntactic structure was too repetitive. Some scenes and passages (the murder, the conversation with the chaplain) should also be revised. The manuscript was then read by editors Jean Paulhan and Raymond Queneau. Gerhard Heller, a German editor, translator and lieutenant in the Wehrmacht working for the Censorship Bureau offered to help.
The original French-language novel was published in Paris on 19 May 1942 by Gallimard as L’Étranger. The book started appearing in bookstores in June 1942, at a price of 25 francs. Only 4,400 copies of it were printed. As a marketing ploy, the title pages and rear wrappers were inscribed to give the false impression that there were eight different editions.
At the time, Camus was suffering from a recurring bout of tuberculosis in Oran and could not travel to France and therefore could not keep with the French publishing tradition of presenting copies of his new book to journalists. He was also unable to read the first reviews published in newspapers or witness the distribution in bookstores. Upon publication, twenty copies were sent to him, but they never arrived and it was not until 17 June that Camus finally received a single copy. Camus was further diagnosed with tuberculosis in both lungs in July 1942 and left Algeria for Panelier, a village near Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the mountains of south-central France.
English translations
In 1946, the first English translation, by British author Stuart Gilbert, was published, based on the first French edition. For more than 30 years, Gilbert’s version was the standard English translation. Gilbert’s choice of title, The Stranger, was changed by Hamish Hamilton to The Outsider, because they considered it “more striking and appropriate” and because Maria Kuncewiczowa’s Polish-language novel Cudzoziemka had recently been published in London as The Stranger.
In the United States, Knopf had already typeset the manuscript using Gilbert’s original title when informed of the name change and so disregarded it; the British–American difference in titles has persisted in subsequent editions. Several scholars, including Helen Sebba, John E. Gale, and Eric Du Plessis, along with commentators such as James Campbell, have noted inaccuracies in the Stuart Gilbert translation and their resulting distortions of the tone of Camus’ original French text in his English translation.
In 1982, the British publisher Hamish Hamilton, which had issued Gilbert’s translation, published a translation by Joseph Laredo, also as The Outsider. Penguin Books bought this version in 1983 for a paperback edition.
In 1988, Vintage published a version in the United States with a translation by American Matthew Ward under the standard American title of The Stranger. Camus was influenced by American literary style, and Ward’s translation expresses American usage and adheres more closely to Camus’ original prose and tone.
In 2012, a newer translation by Sandra Smith was published by Penguin as The Outsider.
Difference between translations
A critical difference among these translations is the expression of emotion in the sentence towards the close of the novel: “I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe” in Gilbert’s translation, versus Laredo’s “I laid my heart open to the gentle indifference of the universe” (original French: la tendre indifférence du monde; literally, “the tender indifference of the world”). The Penguin Classics 2000 reprint of Laredo’s translation has “gentle” changed to “benign”. Smith’s 2012 translation uses the literal translation, “tender”, stating in her Translator’s Note that using “benign” “fails to capture the paradoxical nuance of ‘tender'”.
The ending lines differ as well: Gilbert translates “on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration”, which contrasts with Laredo’s and Smith’s translation of “greet me with cries of hatred.” This passage describes a scene that would serve as a foil to the prior “indifference of the world”. In French, the phrase is “cris de haine”. Ward translates this as “with cries of hate”. Gilbert juxtaposes “execration” with “execution”.
“Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte” is the opening sentence of the novel. English translations have rendered the first sentence as ‘Mother died today’, ‘Maman died today’, or a variant thereof. In 2012, Ryan Bloom argued that it should be translated as ‘Today, Maman died.’ He believes this better expresses the character of Meursault, as developed in the novel, as someone who ‘lives for the moment’, ‘does not consciously dwell on the past’, and ‘does not worry about the future’.
List of English translations
1946, The Outsider (translated by Stuart Gilbert), London: Hamish Hamilton
1946, The Stranger (translated by Stuart Gilbert), New York: Alfred A. Knopf
1982, The Outsider (translated by Joseph Laredo), London: Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 978-0-14-118250-6
1989, The Stranger (translated by Matthew Ward), New York: Vintage, ISBN 978-0-679-72020-1
2012, The Outsider (translated by Sandra Smith), London: Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-138958-5
Film adaptations
1967 Lo Straniero by Luchino Visconti (Italian)
2001 Yazgı (Fate) by Zeki Demirkubuz (Turkish)
Allusions
1990 American psychological horror film Jacob’s Ladder. In the first scene where Jacob finds himself no longer fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, he is on a subway train reading The Stranger.
2001 The Man Who Wasn’t There by The Coen Brothers
2014 The Gambler
2015 Mad Men Season 7, Episode 12: “Ending”
Literature
The Meursault Investigation (2015) by Kamel Daoud is a novel created counter to Camus’s version, from the perspective of an Arab man described as the brother of the murdered man. Referred to only as “The Arab” by Camus, in this novel he is said to have been named Musa, and was an actual man who existed and was mourned by his brother and mother. It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015.
In Camus’ “The Plague”, published in 1948, Camus mentions a woman who “started airing her views about a murder case that had created some stir in Algiers. A young commercial employee had killed an Algerian on a beach”.
