Inaction through action, or action through inaction? The black typeface responding to the white pages, and Vintage International's black and white exploding-stripe jacket design shelters the mundane contrast of character at work in Albert Camus' The Stranger -only, who is the stranger?
It seems as though Camus expects his readers to assume that the main character who tells most of the story in first person narrative (elsewhere other characters speak, signaling free indirect discourse) becomes a stranger to himself, loosing his sense of identity in the world, drawing from Descartes' "I think therefore I am," or "Je pense, donc je suis," or silipsism, or what many people now refer to as existentialism. Call it what you would like, or call it Hamlet.
Shakespeare wrote this type of work well before Camus churned out The Stranger. Hamlet's soliloquies exemplify the "out of body" experience much more sportingly than what the narrator in The Stranger can accomplish with his murder, conviction, and subsequent rant occurring in the book's final chapter. At one point it felt like reading the end of Sinclair Lewis' The Jungle; the end turns into napalm, scolding the reader with pronounced politic consideration.
In the end, however active The Stranger becomes, there are times where the story cannot release its grasp upon the reader, much like how Hamlet's monologue does not allow the audience to sit beyond the play. The scene where the narrator unloads half of a pistol's magazine clip into a Arab on the beach demands each bullet to echo inside the reader's imagination like a chamber of thunder. Or even the book's grim, opening lines "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know" echo in the monotonous telegram notifications that follow: "Mother deceased." These lines are incredibly active, drawing the reader into their storytelling simplicity, yet disturb reader moral, constantly overwhelming the senses with jarring events that funnel into a humdrum disintegrator. But these events described are not ordinary. They are much more serious that the narrator makes them seem and with this, Camus has crafted a companion in the narrator: not a stranger. The narrator functions as an opposite to the reader, opposing the seriousness of each situation, passing time as if it were nothingness: "[d]eep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn't much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living -and for thousands of years. (114)" The narrator's ruminations are as active inside his mind as are his actions in worldly situations where his nerves tremble. His physical self and psychological self are paired, harmoniously and precisely as the book comes to its end. The result: a companion, a self -only stranger.
