Discursive and Unproductive

The Stranger is not so much a novel as a philosophy textbook. Early on, it seems to have plot and narrative structure, but by the second part, Camus drops all pretense of that, shifts the tone radically, and asks over and over again, in the most unsubtle way he can, the same tired questions about judgment, purpose, morality, etc. Quite frankly, I'm not interested. The book and the criticism surrounding the book embody everything I hate about "philosophy" as such; the book, short as it is, takes very simple questions and attaches an awkward plot to them, and then the critics whip each other up into new heights of pretention, acting as if the book has thousands of pages' worth of hidden meanings in it and as if it took twelve years of useless study to understand what Camus was saying, and making up new words for the half-baked "philosophies" they invent while they're at it.

 Here's what the Stranger says:

1) Absolute morality does not exist

2) Judging the actions of those on a different moral "plane" than us/those with a different system of values is futile and not fundamentally just

3) Life is absurd/purposeless/whatever

4) There's no reason to follow or not follow societal mores

There we go. I just summarized a good two weeks of class discussion. If I missed any significant points, I apologize. A quick anecdote for each of those points would be more than sufficient to communicate the point; after all, these are all questions that a good chunk of the population has asked themselves already and considered in the necessary depth by the age of 15. They've been done. No one discusses these things except stoners and pseudo-intellectual middle schoolers, because we've all been there. The only context in which we see these questions these days is

A) In jokes (the sled or wagon rides in Calvin and Hobbes)

B) From idiots determined to "blow your mind, man"

Camus wrote this in '42. Existentialism/Absurdism, to the best of my understanding, was in its infancy. The idea that there was no purpose to life and that everything was ridiculous was probably new and shiny (although it must have been considered in private by any number of intelligent people who didn't label themselves "philosophers" or whatever). Perhaps it was worth a book to drive the point home. But I don't think that I gained a single thing from reading The Stranger, other than a new source to quote when I want to do pretentious arguments.

A good example of the type of people who "get" this book-

Listen to that. The guy is literally just recounting the scene from Chapter 6 in his best angsty voice while some OK music plays in the background.

He literally says "I'm The Stranger... Killing an arab" like 4 times. But oh, if you were a Cure fan who'd read Camus, wouldn't you be thrilled that you got it? If you didn't get it at first and then went and read The Stranger, wouldn't you appreciate how intellectual the cure was? I mean, look at all the hidden meanings in that song! See, when he says

I can turn
And walk away
Or I can fire the gun
Staring at the sky
Staring at the sun
Whichever I chose
It amounts to the same
Absolutely nothing

He's recounting what was explained to us in The Stranger, which is that life being absurd and all, the path you take makes no difference in the grand scheme of things, or even to you, since you don't care about how you live or when you die. How complex! That really did need its own song.