The Stranger And Justice

The Stranger, by Alfred Camus is an existentialist work set in Camus’s native city of Algiers during the 1940s. Divided into two parts, The Stranger forms a poignant argument for the absurdity of human life. Between parts one and two, Camus steers our perspective from that of society to that of Meursault, effectively steering the reader to identify with precisely the mentality they abhorred in part one. In The Stranger, Camus argues that humans irrationally seek to apply meaning based on arbitrary constructs to a universe where none exists. As we are all constituents in this meaningless universe, our notions of justice are rendered absurd and our relationships insignificant. By the end of the novel, Camus argues that we are all like Meursault;

The jurors, judge, and lawyers devote more time to discussing Meursault’s lack of empathy and emotionality than his actual crime. Additionally, he exhibits an individuality that is an intrinsic threat to the order of a functional society. On page 77, he remarks that he would be just as content to live completely alone “penned in a hollow tree trunk”. Since he values only himself, authority figures cannot exert power over him, because he does not share their sense of hierarchy, values, fears, or desire to exist cohesively in society. He is sentenced to death largely because he is a threat to a social order sustained by a shared set of values, which are founded in a belief in meaning. As his punishment doesn’t correlate directly to his crime, Camus illustrates that human execution of justice is intrinsically flawed. The reader begins to sympathize with Meursault because he faces an unjust conviction, and becomes more receptive to Camus’s ultimate argument that the very notion of justice evoked in part one is an absurd concept. On page 121, Meursault remarks “the little robot woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson married, or as Marie”. In this passage, Camus argues that we are all equally guilty because we are all part of the same universe, a universe Meursault labels as “tenderly indifferent”. If the universe is indifferent and meaningless, we, as its products, are meaningless and our attempts to assign meaning to the world are ultimately