The Infernal Existence and the Paranoid Life in Albert Camus’s The Stranger

پوختە

This paper studies Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942), focusing, in the main, on the novel’s principal character, Meursault, and trying to answer some of the questions often raised on his personality as well as motivation. According to the reading presented here, Meursault is truly a stranger or an outsider not merely because he is a social non-conformist, a rebel against many of his society’s norms and conventions, but also a person suffering from some mental disorder, namely, paranoia. The impact of such a psychological disease renders him a victim of an inability of self-control, which may explain his criminal action at the end of the book’s first part. Evidently, Meursault is an abnormal person based on his attitudes of life and of the people around him. His strangeness is largely manifested in his anxiety about what he considers the profound effect of some objects in his environment, including the sun and the sea, along with such natural phenomena as heat and light. The effect of all these on him is almost insurmountable, and the experiences he has all through the novel have only a hellish outlook. Aside from the references made by certain critics to the role of the sun in Meursault’s existence, this study tries to emphasize that Meursault, the atheist, develops some paranoia symptoms and premonitions under the effect of the sun. Such overemphasis of the sun and its heat at different parts of the story may testify to the hero’s obsession with it and inability to have control of his feelings, especially when he is under the effect of its fiery manifestations.