Alright. So. I just finished reading The Stranger and I need to rant about it real quick.
Quick synopsis (spoilers ahead): The Stranger is about a man (Mersault) who feels "nothing" and ends up killing a man, gets arrested, and presumably executed.
What it seems like Camus is trying to say with this book is that a man who feels nothing and does not worship God is clearly a bad man who can only feel alive under the threat of death. There are many instances in the latter half of the book where Mersault's character is attacked by the prosecuter, who cites incidents such has him feeling nothing at his mother's passing and having a cigarette around the time of her funeral. Towards the end of the book (the last few pages), Mersault talks to the prison chaplain after his death sentence is announced. It is in this part of the book that it felt like Camus was really pushing for the idea that if you don't believe in God or any afterlife, you must be immoral. To me, it seemed as though the author's intent in writing this book was to try and push that very idea. To me, I felt like he mentioned many things that could have made a more interesting and less preachy. He could have talked more about the failures of the justice system where they see a man who, in my eyes, has some sort of mental illness which we can see by his lack of emotion at events that make most people irrational, he overanalyzes most if not all social interactions and he remains perfectly calm even in most situations. I have seen a few analyses of this book where they claim that the ending of the book where he wishes for spectators at his execution and where he is talking about how he should have been more interested in executions and where he explains why he has to accept the rejection of his appeal as nothing more than death is the only thing that Man is truly interested in. I don't see it that way at all. I see it as a man trying to rationalize his demise as a way to come to terms with it. We have seen many times over that Mersault is a rational person. He (generally) doesn't get uppity and when he thinks about his life and others, he has a rational thought process. I believe that he finds peace not through belief and religion, but through understanding the logic of events.
I will say that I very much enjoyed his writing style, especially around the parts where Mersault killed the man and the last page of the book. It drew me in when he switched from the plain writing style to a more evocative style to show how much more of the world Mersault saw in those moments.
That wasn't very organized, but I did say it was a rant. So take what you will from that.
tl;dr: Camus focused too much on God and not enough on a failing justice system and a man with a mental illness trying to rationalize his ending.
