The Stranger by Albert Camus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
One of the remarks of existentialism has do with how we conduct ourselves for ourselves among others who would rather we behave differently for them.
Camus here writes about an alienated man, one who is unable to come to know himself but for whom others, and their desires for how life should be, cannot fully pull him in either.
This man is a stranger to himself as he is a stranger to others. He reserves meaning for his own actions and he cannot answer in a socially acceptable way for himself or others for his own existence and his own actions. In being so selfish, he finds peace and happiness to realize himself, even as he is to be executed.
He does not own his actions. But he does minimally behave in others’ worlds. Spoken another way, he is a torsion in their localized existence and as such, must be eliminated. He is a subjectivity, one who becomes self aware for himself in himself. In a kind of highschool (Ernest Hemmingway kind of sense), Camus suggests this to be the greatest crime of all.
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