The Stranger

Usually there is no escape for readers. Whatever the author has presented to us,
we readily accept. This is the case with Camus’s The Stranger. He presents a stark world
where nothing matters and all is hopeless. There is no salvation through it. In Dante’s
Inferno, however, there is salvation. Dante gives us hope. That in itself is our salvation.
Just the aspiration of there being more to life is all we need.
Camus’s The Stranger has placed humanity in a state of simply existing. Life has
no value at all. There is no way to give life value because everything ends in the same
way: Death. Meursault has no emotions. He looks at everything as if from the outside, as
a stranger. He has no aspirations to change his world, to make any real connection or feel
any deep emotion. When his mother died, for example, Meursault never seemed to care.
“Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her”(122). He felt content with the
indifference of the world and desired no attachm...