Life & Background
Camus was born in French Algeria in 1913 to a family of poor European settlers; his father was killed at the Marne the following year, and he grew up with an illiterate, nearly deaf mother in a two-room flat in a working-class district of Algiers. A teacher secured him a scholarship, and he studied philosophy at the University of Algiers until tuberculosis ended his academic hopes. He worked as a journalist, ran a theatre company, and during the Occupation edited the Resistance newspaper Combat in Paris. His public break with Sartre in 1952 over communism and political violence ended their friendship. His position on the Algerian war — opposing both colonial rule and the terrorism of the independence struggle, and his remark about choosing his mother over justice — left him isolated. He won the Nobel Prize at forty-four and died in a car crash three years later.
The Outsider
Meursault, a clerk in Algiers, learns of his mother's death and travels to her home for the funeral, where he does not cry, smokes by the coffin, and drinks coffee. The next day he begins an affair with Marie and goes to a comedy at the cinema. He helps his neighbour Raymond, a violent man, in a dispute with an Arab woman's family. On a beach in the glare of the sun, dazzled and sweating, he shoots an Arab man, and then fires four more times. The second half is the trial, in which the prosecution builds its case less on the killing than on his failure to weep at his mother's funeral. Condemned to death, he refuses the chaplain's consolation and, in a final outburst, opens himself to the gentle indifference of the world.
The novel's famous flat style — short declarative sentences in the passé composé, a narrator who reports sensation and withholds interpretation — is the technique that makes the philosophy work: Meursault is condemned for not performing the emotions society requires, and the prose refuses to perform them either. The Myth of Sisyphus supplies the argument: the absurd is not in the world or in the mind but in the confrontation between human demand for meaning and the world's silence, and the response is neither suicide nor a leap of faith but revolt, which is why Sisyphus must be imagined happy. Postcolonial criticism, particularly Edward Said and Conor Cruise O'Brien, has focused on the unnamed Arab victim and on an Algeria depicted as landscape for a European conscience — an argument Kamel Daoud answered in fiction with The Meursault Investigation.
Why Camus Matters
Camus gave the twentieth century its most accessible account of living without metaphysical guarantee, and The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus are the standard introductory texts on absurdism. The Plague, an allegory of occupation and of any collective catastrophe, has been continuously reread in epidemics. He also matters as a political thinker on the limits of revolutionary violence, and as a colonial writer whose position on Algeria makes him a productive case in postcolonial criticism rather than simply a target of it.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Outsider (L'Étranger)1942
- The Myth of Sisyphus1942
- Caligula1944
- The Plague1947
- The Rebel1951
- The Fall1956
- The First Man1994