Albert Camus 'The Stranger'

The Stranger Reading Journal Essay

In Albert Camus’ The Stranger, the story is told in a first person point of view from Monsieur Meursault as the narrator. For a more obvious reason, the book is told in his point of view because he is the main character, but there are multiple other possibilities for why Camus did so. The book is a memory of what happened leading up to his execution, which is why it needed to be in first person point of view. Camus did this because there are a lot of things we could see from Meursault’s perspective that we couldn’t from the third person point of view, which led to the book’s theme. Since it is all a recollection of the events leading up to his execution, we get to see inside Monsieur Meursault’s head find his true feelings
Monsieur Meursault had little to no feelings whatsoever; the only time he actually shared feelings other than that of indifference was when he wanted to complain about something. Everything he did was always just because he could; nothing mattered to him. “But I hesitated, because I didn’t know if I could do it with Maman right there. I thought about it; it didn’t matter” (Camus 8). He thought about not dishonoring his deceased mother by having a smoke right in front of her casket, then decided it didn’t matter. Everything was meaningless to him, he just went through life doing exactly what he wanted because nothing mattered anyway. He didn’t even care when he found out his mother died, he was just very choppy and to the point. “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral Tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean