Themes And Symbolism In The Stranger By Albert Camus

In every novel, symbolism plays a role that is crucial to understanding the themes present in the novel. Authors use symbolism to create memorable scenes that have a hidden meaning behind their original face value. Symbolism especially plays a huge role in The Stranger, a novel by Albert Camus, where the author’s examples imply various emotional short-cuts and serve as a helper to understand the inner world of the main character – Meursault. This is a thought-provoking novel, which brilliantly illustrates Albert Camus’s theme of absurdity. One interesting aspect about The Stranger is the protagonist, in whose life there are no certain meanings and his actions have no motives. The absurdity of the protagonist has no rational explanation. Each of Meursault’s many actions have a huge influence on the author’s description of the indifference of the world, where symbolism used by the author underlines a human’s dignity and unimportance in the world. In the provocative novel The Stranger by Albert Camus, the author uses symbols such as the crucifix, the courtroom and the weather effectively in order to shape and reinforce the theme of the benign indifference of the world.
The Crucifix, which the judge presents to Meursault, symbolizes Christianity, but at the same time there is another meaning behind it. The Crucifix represents the acceptance by society of the afterlife world, that life itself has a higher meaning and significance rather than just a person living instinctively, without any purposes. This idea of the afterlife world plays a huge contrast to the absurdity of the Meursault’s world view. Even though Christianity is based on the idea that a person’s life has rational motives for existence, Albert Camus’s theme of absurdit...

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...ed by the court and then executed on the chaplain. Camus underlines the idea of the actual certainty in life, which according to Meursault is death itself. Before being executed, Meursault explains the main idea of novel – the absurd worldview, where our relevance in this world is almost negligible, we all live and all of us die and that at the end none of what we did with our life really has any significant value. Albert Camus effectively translates the concept of absurdity to the novel, proving the original contradiction to the human desire to rationalize the world and universe. To consolidate his ideas and transmit better his thoughts through the novel, he uses symbolism, through which he successfully strengthens the main theme. With the help of vivid symbolism he shows that life is fundamentally absurd, irrational and without any certain order in the universe.