Albert Camus 'The Stranger': A Literary Analysis

In Albert Camus’ Nobel Prize winning piece of work, The Stranger, he presents to his readers one of the most confusing and “strangest” character in the history of literature, Meursault. Meursault lives in a town called Algiers, and there, he gets himself into an unavoidable series of events that will lead up to his unfortunate end. Albert Camus does a wonderful job of weaving hints and traces of significant symbols and references to other famous works of literature to build the atmosphere and the intensity of the novel. In Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, the Foster mentions that one way to create immense depth and relationship between people, objects, and feelings in literature can be done by using various references
In other words, the enemy can be in the disguise of what seems to be good. In Meursault’s case, his devil was disguised as the sun. Yes, the sun, the exact sun that was shining down on him from the day he traveled to his mother’s funeral, the beach date with Maria, and to the day he pulled out a gun and made his first kill. Although many readers will argue that his repeated complaints and compliments to the sun are only said to prove his sociopathic nature and his apathy to the events and emotions set around him, it can be rebuttaled that the sun can be represented as the serpent that influenced Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. On the way to bury Meursault’s deceased mother, his indifferent attitude towards his mother’s death escalated to great annoyance all because of the scorching sun, and in the moment Meursault approached the Arab man at the beach after their previous violent encounter, he described the sun as “the same as it had been the day [he] buried Maman” (Camus 58). Then, Meursault finally accepted “the apple” by the “serpent sun” when he pulled the trigger to shoot the Arab with the sun making a lasting effect by burning onto his skin, and just like Adam and Eve, Meursault’s life began to fall apart, away from his “Garden of Eden” and on to death
Throughout different parts of the novel, Meursault demonstrates his atheist beliefs and his refusal to believe in a God, especially in Part Two of The Stranger: firstly, in trial, where he stood as the defendant in the death of the Arab man, the religious judge offers Meursault to be a “changed man” by accepting God as his “rescuer” of his sinful deeds, but Meursault turns down the offer; and secondly, when the chaplain offers Meursault a chance to redeem his freedom by, once again, going into the hands of God, Meursault, this time, violently denies the religion and refuses any help to his dilemma. However, what makes the situation ironic is the fact that before Meursault’s execution, he becomes “cleansed” of his confessions; everything that had been inside of his thoughts and heart came to light with the chaplain who was there to hear his rage. Not only that, Meursault wished for a “large crowd of spectators” on the day of his death and with messages of hate (Camus 123). This depiction of an execution is most definitely similar to the death of Jesus Christ. In the Bible, Jesus, the man who had lived his entire life as “pure as white,” became the anomaly and “the stranger” of Jerusalem and was declared to die in public, in front of a large crowd crying words of hate and accusation. Despite Meursault’s denial of religion, his execution, in a way, becomes a “holy” figure. Albert Camus’ The Stranger, despite its first