Focus on the Ideas, Not the Words - Albert Camus' "The Stranger"

I was struck by the ‘author worship’ that I witnessed during class discussions of The Stranger. I was distinctly reminded of my time in church when I was younger. Not only were the words out of those holy books taken to be perfect and absolute, but equally valid were any conclusions that could be drawn by reading between the lines. I would find myself being praised for pulling a moral “truth” out from the subtext of a verse or a line, a moral that, in hindsight, the author really had no intention of implying. A similar type of thing seems to be happening with The Stranger, at least in the class discussions I have been a part of. With all due respect to Albert Camus, the great philosopher and author that he is, he is but a man and his words should be regarded as such. I find it hard to believe that Camus intended for his work to be the object of intense scrutiny and the template from which diverse conclusions can be drawn. Rather it would seem to me that his work is meant to be the diving off point for discourse to occur separately and independently from the pages of his novel. To spur the kind of existentialist thinking that is demonstrated in his writing. No where is this more clear to me than in the final few paragraphs of The Stranger. With the story of our protagonist drawing to a close, Camus effectively presents the ‘thesis’ of his novel, “Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn't even be sure of being alive. It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming.” Over the span of about half a page, Camus presents the train of existentialist thought that has been gaining speed throughout the length of the novel. This is where I believe he wanted the focus of the novel to be, not on the specifics of Marie’s manner of speech or the way the courtroom was described, the 74 pages prior to this final outburst serve merely as a “slow, persistent breeze” (Camus, 75) in order to set up the final, thought provoking, existentialist message Camus dedicated his life’s work to.