The Outsider - Albert Camus

Standing On A Beach... (The Outsider - Albert Camus)

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Product: The Outsider - Albert Camus
Date: 03/01/06 (1636 review reads)
Rating:  

Advantages: A Work Of Genius

Disadvantages: Disturbing At Times...

BACKGROUND: ‘In our society,’ wrote Albert Camus, ‘any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.’ This may seem a bewilderingly dramatic, almost self-indulgent sort of assertion, but it is one which Camus brought to life in The Outsider, and to frankly devastating effect. The Outsider has become something of a cult classic over the years, especially in undergraduate circles. It inspired The Cure’s ‘Killing an Arab’, a song which attracted a degree of controversy when it was (wrongly) assumed to advocate racial violence. The Outsider itself has also been subject to an array of assumptions and misconceptions, particularly with regards to its philosophical project. In my opinion, however, it is not only one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century, but also one that provides a useful introduction to one of that century’s most compelling philosophical movements, Existentialism.

The Outsider, first published in France as ‘L’Étranger in 1942, is commonly regarded as the greatest example of the Existentialist novel, outshining even Sartre’s La Nausée. This in itself is an extraordinary feat, for, whilst Jean-Paul Sartre was generally regarded as the founding father of Twentieth Century Existentialism, and held an almost unassailable sway over France’s academic elite for several decades, Albert Camus first emerged as a relatively obscure journalist and playwright, who had grown up in poverty in Algiers.

Sartrean Existentialism is a finely wrought thing, the agonising complexities of... [continues]

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