Explanation of The Stranger, by Jean-Paul Sartre | Original English Translation

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Explanation of The Stranger”, in Situations I, 1947

Barely out of the presses, Camus’s The Stranger enjoyed enormous favor. It was said again and again that it was “the best book since the armistice.” In the midst of the literary production of the time, this novel was itself a stranger. It came to us from the other side of the line, from across the sea; it spoke of the sun in that bitter, coalless spring—not as an exotic wonder but with the weary familiarity of those who have indulged in it too much; it cared not to once again inter its own hands the old regime, nor to instill in us the sense of our own unworthiness; while reading, one recalled that there had once been works which claimed to be self-justifying and to prove nothing. Yet in exchange for this very gratuitousness the novel remained rather ambiguous: how were we to understand this character, who, the day after his mother’s death, “took baths, began an illicit liaison and went to laugh at a comedy film,” who killed an Arab “because of the sun” and who, on the eve of his capital execution—affirming that he “had been happy and still was”—desired a multitude of spectators around the scaffold “to greet him with cries of hate, of hate”? Some said, “He’s a simpleton, a poor fellow”; others, with more insight, declared, “He is an innocent.” And yet one could not grasp the meaning of that innocence.

Mr. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus (published a few months later), gave us the exact commentary on his work: his hero is neither good nor evil, neither moral nor immoral. These categories do not suit him; he belongs to a very singular species which the author designates as “absurd.” But under Mr. Camus’s pen that very word takes on two very different meanings: the absurd is both a state of affairs and the lucid awareness certain persons have of that state. Is “absurd” the man who, from a fundamental absurdity, infallibly draws the conclusions that are imposed? Here one witnesses the same shift in meaning as when one calls “swing” a youth who dances swing. Then what is the absurd as a state of affairs, as an original datum? Nothing less than the relation of man to the world. The primary absurdity manifests itself first as a divorce: the divorce between man’s aspirations toward unity and the insurmountable dualism of mind and nature, between man’s thrust toward the eternal and the finite nature of his existence, between the very “concern” that is his essence and the futility of his efforts. Death, the irreducible pluralism of truths and beings, the unintelligibility of the real, chance—these are the poles of the absurd. Admittedly, these are not altogether new themes, and Mr. Camus does not present them as such. They were already enumerated, as early as the seventeenth century, by a certain kind of dry, terse, and contemplative reason that is peculiarly French: they served as commonplaces for classical pessimism. Was it not Pascal who insisted on “the natural misery of our weak, mortal condition—so wretched that nothing can console us when we scrutinize it”? Is it not he who stakes his claim for reason? Would he not unreservedly approve of Mr. Camus’s remark, “The world is neither (quite) rational nor to that extent irrational”? Does he not show us that “custom” and “diversion” conceal in man “his nothingness, his abandonment, his insufficiency, his impotence, his void”?

By the icy style of The Myth of Sisyphus and the subject of his essays, Mr. Camus places himself within the grand tradition of those French moralists whom Andler rightly calls the precursors of Nietzsche; and regarding the doubts he raises about the reach of our reason, they lie in the more recent tradition of French epistemology. When one thinks of scientific nominalism, of Poincaré, Duhem, Meyerson, one better understands the reproach our author levels against modern science: “… You speak to me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons revolve around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I then recognize that you have come to poetry…”

That is what is expressed, almost simultaneously, by an author who draws from the same sources when he writes: “(Physics) employs indiscriminately mechanical, dynamic or even psychological models, as though, freed from ontological pretensions, it became indifferent to the classical antinomies of mechanism or dynamism—which presuppose a nature in itself.” Mr. Camus is somewhat coy in citing texts by Jaspers, by Heidegger, by Kierkegaard—authors he does not seem, moreover, to fully understand. Yet his true masters lie elsewhere: in the twist of his reasonings, the clarity of his ideas, the cut of his essayistic style, and a certain kind of orderly, ceremonious, desolate, sunlit severity—all of which herald a classic, a Mediterranean.

Not even his method (“it is the balance of evidence and lyricism that alone can grant us simultaneous access to both emotion and clarity”) fails to evoke the ancient “passionate geometries” of Pascal or Rousseau, and to bring him closer to Maurras—this other Mediterranean, from whom he still differs in so many respects, much more than from any German phenomenologist or Danish existentialist.

But Mr. Camus would, no doubt, gladly concede all this. In his eyes his originality lies in taking his ideas to their ultimate end: for him it is not a question of collecting pessimistic maxims. Granted, the absurd is not in man nor in the world when taken separately; yet since it is man’s very condition to be “being-in-the-world,” the absurd, in the final analysis, is one with the human condition. Hence it is not primarily the object of a mere notion—it is a desolate illumination that reveals it to us.

“Waking, tram, four hours at the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday on the same rhythm…” and then, all at once, “the scenery collapses” and we are plunged into a hopeless lucidity. So if we know how to refuse the deceptive succor of religions or existential philosophies, we cling to a few essential certainties: the world is chaos—a “divine equivalence born of anarchy”; there is no tomorrow, for we die.

“… In a universe suddenly deprived of illusions and light, man feels like a stranger. This exile is without remedy, for he is deprived both of the memories of a lost homeland and of the hope of a promised land.” For indeed man is not the world: “If I were a tree among trees… this life would have meaning—or rather this problem would cease to exist, for I would be part of that world. I would be that world, to which I now oppose myself with all my consciousness…”

Thus is partially explained the title of our novel: the stranger is the man set against the world; Mr. Camus might just as well have chosen, to designate his work, the title of one of Georges Gissing’s works: Born in Exile. The stranger is also the man among men. “There are days when… one finds, as though a stranger, the one one had loved.” And finally, it is myself in relation to myself—in other words, the man of nature vis-à-vis the mind: “The stranger who, at certain moments, comes to meet us in the mirror.”

But that is not all: there is also a passion for the absurd. The absurd man does not commit suicide; he wishes to live, without renouncing any of his certainties, without a tomorrow, without hope, without illusion, and without resignation either. The absurd man asserts himself in revolt. He fixes his gaze on death with a passionate intensity, and that fascination liberates him: he understands the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man. All is permitted, for God is not, and we all must die. All experiences are equivalent; one must only acquire as many as possible.

“The present and the succession of presents before a soul that is ever aware—this is the ideal of the absurd man.” All values crumble before this “ethic of quantity”; the absurd man, hurled into this world—revolt, irreverence—has “nothing to justify.” He is innocent. Innocent like those primitives spoken of by S. Maugham before the arrival of the pastor who instructs them in Good and Evil, in what is permitted and what is forbidden: for him everything is allowed. Innocent in every sense of the word—indeed, a fool as well, if you will. And it is only in this way that we fully understand the title of Camus’s novel. The stranger he wishes to depict is precisely one of those terrible innocents who scandalize society by refusing to abide by its rules. He lives among strangers, yet to them too he is a stranger. That is why some will love him—like Marie, his mistress, who holds him dear “because he is odd”—and others will hate him for it, as does that jury at the trial whose hatred suddenly rises against him. And we, who, upon opening the book, are not yet acquainted with the sentiment of the absurd, would in vain try to judge him by our accustomed standards—for us too he is a stranger.

Thus is roughly indicated the manner in which we must regard the hero of The Stranger. Had Mr. Camus wished to write a novel of thesis, it would not have been difficult for him to show a civil servant enthroned within his family, then suddenly seized by the intuition of the absurd, struggling for a moment before finally resolving to live the fundamental absurdity of his condition. The reader would have been convinced both of the character and, for the same reasons, by the character himself. Or, again, he might have recounted the life of one of those saints of the absurd—as he enumerates in The Myth of Sisyphus, who enjoy his particular favor: Don Juan, the Comedian, the Conqueror, the Creator. This is not what he has done, and even for the reader familiar with the theories of the absurd, Meursault—the hero of The Stranger—remains ambiguous. Certainly we are assured that he is absurd, and ruthless lucidity is his principal trait. Moreover, in more than one respect he is constructed in such a manner as to serve as a confirmed illustration of the theories expounded in The Myth of Sisyphus. For example, Mr. Camus writes in that work: “A man is more a man by the things he keeps silent about than by the things he says.” And Meursault is an example of that virile silence, that refusal to indulge in empty verbiage: “(When asked) if he had noticed that I was withdrawn, he only acknowledged that I did not speak for the sake of speaking.” And just two lines above, the same witness declared that Meursault “was a man.” “(When asked) what he meant by that, he stated that everyone knew what he meant.”

Similarly, Mr. Camus elaborates at length on love in The Myth of Sisyphus: “We call love that which binds us to certain beings only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.” And, concurrently, we read in The Stranger: “She then wanted to know if I loved her. I replied… that it meant nothing, but that perhaps I did not love her.” From this point of view, the debate that ensues at the trial and in the mind of the reader concerning the question “Did Meursault love his mother?” is doubly absurd. First, as the lawyer remarks, “Is he accused of having buried his mother or of having killed a man?” But above all, the word “love” is rendered meaningless. Sure enough, Meursault placed his mother in an asylum—because he lacked money and because they “had nothing more to say to one another.” Surely, he did not visit her often, “because it consumed his Sunday—not to mention the effort to catch the bus, buy tickets, and drive for two hours.” But what does that signify? Is it not all confined to the present, entirely determined by his immediate whims? What we call a sentiment is nothing but the abstract unity and significance of discontinuous impressions. I do not always think of those I love; yet I claim that I love them even when they do not occupy my thoughts—and I would be willing to compromise my tranquility in the name of an abstract sentiment in the absence of any genuine, immediate emotion.

Meursault thinks and acts differently: he does not wish to know those grand, continuous feelings, all alike; for him, love does not exist—not even loves. Only the present matters, the concrete. He goes to see his mother when he feels like it, that is all. If the desire is there, it will be strong enough to make him catch the bus; if another concrete desire arises, it will be forceful enough to have him run at full speed and leap into a moving truck. Yet he always designates his mother with the tender, childlike word “maman” and never misses an opportunity to understand and identify with her. “Of love, I know only that mixture of desire, tenderness and understanding which binds me to a certain being.” Thus one sees that one must not neglect the theoretical side of Meursault’s character.

Likewise, many of his adventures primarily serve to highlight one or another aspect of fundamental absurdity. For instance, as we have seen, The Myth of Sisyphus extols the “perfect availability of the condemned man, before whom the prison gates open at a certain small dawn”—and it is for us to enjoy that dawn and that availability that Mr. Camus has condemned his hero to the death penalty. “How had I not seen,” he is made to say, “that nothing was more important than an execution… and, in a sense, it was even the only thing truly interesting for a man!” One could multiply examples and quotations. And yet this lucid, indifferent, taciturn man is not entirely constructed for the cause’s sake. No doubt, once sketched, his character completed itself—the character perhaps had a certain inherent heft. In any event, his absurdity does not seem to be a conquest but a given: he is just that way, period. He will have his moment of illumination on the final page, but he has always lived according to Mr. Camus’s standards. If there were any grace in the absurd, one should say that he possesses it. He does not seem to pose any of those questions that are raised in The Myth of Sisyphus; one does not see that he was in revolt before being condemned to death. He was happy, he allowed himself to drift, and his happiness does not even seem to have known that secret bite—which Mr. Camus repeatedly points out in his essay—that comes from the dazzling presence of death. His indifference often appears merely as a kind of lethargy, as on that Sunday when he stays home simply out of laziness and admits that he “was a little bored.” Thus, even from an absurd perspective, the character retains a peculiar opacity. He is not the Don Juan, nor the Don Quixote of absurdity; indeed, one might even be inclined to believe he is the Sancho Panza. He is there, he exists, and we cannot fully understand or judge him; he lives, and that is the sole literary density that can justify him in our eyes.

Yet one must not regard The Stranger as an entirely gratuitous work. Mr. Camus distinguishes— as we have said—between the sentiment and the notion of the absurd. On this subject he writes: “Like great works, profound sentiments always signify more than they are conscious of saying… Great sentiments carry with them their splendid or miserable universe.” And he adds a little further on: “The sentiment of the absurd is not, however, the notion of the absurd. It is its foundation—that is all. It does not reduce to it…” One might say that The Myth of Sisyphus aims to furnish us with that notion and that The Stranger seeks to inspire in us that sentiment. The order in which the two works appeared seems to confirm this hypothesis; The Stranger, published first, plunges us unadorned into the “climate” of the absurd; the essay comes later to illuminate the landscape. Now, the absurd is that divorce, that disjunction. The Stranger is therefore a novel of displacement, of divorce, of dislocation. Hence its ingenious construction: on the one hand the daily, amorphous flux of lived reality, and on the other the edifying re-composition of that reality by human reason and discourse. It is essential that the reader, having been first confronted with pure reality, later finds it again, unrecognized, in its rational transposition. From there is born the sentiment of the absurd—that is, our impotence in thinking, with our concepts, with our words, the events of the world.

Meursault buries his mother, takes a mistress, commits a crime. These various facts will be recounted at his trial by grouped witnesses, explained by the public prosecutor: Meursault will have the impression that one is speaking of another. Everything is constructed so as to suddenly bring about the explosion of Marie, who, having testified in court with a narrative composed according to human rules, bursts into tears and exclaims “that it was not so, that there was something else, that they were forcing her to say the opposite of what she truly thought.” These maneuvers of ice are commonly employed since Les Faux Monnayeurs. That is not Mr. Camus’s originality. But the problem he must resolve imposes on him an original form: so that we may feel the gap between the public prosecutor’s conclusions and the true circumstances of the murder, so that when we close the book we retain the impression of an absurd justice that can never understand or reach the facts it seeks to punish, it is necessary that we have first been put in contact with reality, or with one of those circumstances. Yet to establish that contact Mr. Camus, like the public prosecutor, has only words and concepts at his disposal; he must describe with words, by assembling thoughts, the world before words. The first part of The Stranger might be entitled—as a recent book might be—“Translated from Silence.” Here we touch on a malady common to many contemporary writers—the early manifestations of which I see in Jules Renard; I would call it: the haunting of silence. Mr. Paulhan would undoubtedly regard it as an effect of literary terrorism. It has taken a thousand forms—from the automatic writing of the surrealists to the famous “theater of silence” of J.-J. Bernard. It is that silence which, as Heidegger says, is the authentic mode of speech. Only he who is capable of speech remains silent. Mr. Camus talks much—in The Myth of Sisyphus he even chatters. And yet he confides his love of silence. He quotes Kierkegaard’s phrase, “The surest mutism is not to remain silent but to speak,” and he himself adds that “a man is more a man by the things he keeps silent about than by the things he says.” Thus, in The Stranger, he has undertaken to be silent.

But how does one remain silent with words? How does one render, with concepts, the unthinkable and disordered succession of presents? This wager involves resorting to a new technique.

What is this technique? I was told, “It is Kafka written by Hemingway.” I confess that I have not detected Kafka here. Mr. Camus’s views are entirely terrestrial. Kafka is the novelist of impossible transcendence—for him, the universe is laden with signs which we do not understand; there is a reverse side to the decor. For Mr. Camus, the human drama is, on the contrary, the absence of any transcendence: “I do not know whether this world has a meaning that exceeds me. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that, for the moment, it is impossible for me to know it. What would it mean for me to have a meaning beyond my condition? I can understand only in human terms what I touch, what resists me.”

It is not, therefore, a matter of finding word arrangements that might hint at an inhuman and indecipherable order: the inhuman, for him, is simply disorder—the mechanical. Nothing shady, nothing disturbing, nothing insinuated: The Stranger offers us a succession of luminous views. If they dislocate us, it is solely by their number and by the absence of any link that unites them. Mornings, clear evenings, relentless afternoons—these are his favorite hours; the perpetual summer of Algiers is his season. Night has little place in his universe. If he speaks of it, he does so thus: “I awoke with stars on my face. Sounds of the countryside rose to me. Scents of night, of earth and salt refreshed my temples. The marvelous peace of that sleeping summer entered me like a tide.”

The writer of these lines is as far removed as possible from the anxieties of a Kafka; he is at ease in the heart of disorder—even if the obstinate blindness of nature may annoy him, it reassures him, for its irrationality is only a negative: the absurd man is a humanist, he knows only the goods of this world.

The comparison with Hemingway seems more fruitful. The kinship between the two styles is evident. In both texts the sentences are short—each one refusing to profit from the momentum of the previous sentence; each is like a snapshot of a gesture, of an object. To every new gesture, to every new object corresponds a new sentence. And yet I am not entirely satisfied: the existence of an “American” narrative technique has, no doubt, served Mr. Camus. I doubt that it has, strictly speaking, influenced him. Even in Death in the Afternoon—which is not a novel—Hemingway retains that jerky mode of narration in which each sentence emerges from nothing by a sort of respiratory spasm: his style is his own. We already know that Mr. Camus possesses another style—a style of ceremony. Moreover, in The Stranger itself he sometimes raises his tone; then the sentence resumes a broader, continuous flow: “The cry of the newsvendors in the already relaxed air, the last birds in the square, the call of the sandwich vendors, the lament of the trams on the high curves of the city, and that murmur of the sky before the night tipped over the port—all this composed for me an itinerary of the blind that I had known well before entering prison.”

Through the gasping narration of Meursault, I glimpse, in transparency, a broader poetic prose underlying his work—a mode of expression that must be uniquely Mr. Camus’s. If The Stranger bears such visible traces of the American technique, it is because it is a deliberate borrowing. Mr. Camus has chosen, among the instruments available to him, that which seemed best suited to his purpose. I doubt that he will continue to use it in his future works.

Let us now examine more closely the fabric of the narrative so that we may better understand its methods. “Men also secrete the inhuman,” writes Mr. Camus. In certain moments of lucidity the mechanical aspect of their gestures—their pantomime devoid of meaning—renders all that surrounds them stupid. This is what must first be conveyed: The Stranger must immediately plunge us into a state of discomfort before the inhumanity of man. But what are those singular occasions that can provoke in us such discomfort? The Myth of Sisyphus provides an example: “A man speaks on the telephone, behind a glass partition; one does not hear him, but one sees his expression without resonance: one wonders why he lives.”

Here we are informed—almost too much so, for the example reveals a certain bias on the part of the author. Indeed, the gesture of the man on the phone—whom you do not hear—is only relatively absurd: it belongs to a truncated circuit. Open the door, put your ear to the receiver: the circuit is restored, human activity resumes its meaning. One might then, if being entirely honest, say that there are only relative absurdities—and only by reference to “absolute rationals.” But this is not a question of honesty; it is a matter of art. Mr. Camus’s method is altogether ingenious: between the characters he describes and the reader he interposes a glass partition. What is more inane than men behind a pane? It seems that it lets everything pass, stopping only one thing—the meaning of their gestures. What remains is to choose the glass: it will be the consciousness of the Stranger. Indeed, it is a transparency: we see everything it sees. Only it has been constructed so as to be transparent to things and opaque to meanings.

“From that moment everything sped up. Men advanced toward the beer with a sheet. The priest, his followers, the director, and I went out. In front of the door there was a lady whom I did not know: ‘Mr. Meursault,’ said the director. I did not catch the lady’s name; I only understood that she was the designated nurse. She inclined her bony face without a smile, and then we lined up to let the body pass.”

Men dance behind a glass. Between them and the reader a consciousness—almost nothing, a pure translucence, a sheer passivity that registers all events—has been interposed. And the trick is complete: precisely because it is passive, consciousness registers only the facts. The reader does not notice this interposition. But then what is the postulate implied by this type of narrative? In short, what was once a melodious organization has been rendered an addition of invariant elements; it is claimed that the succession of movements is rigorously identical to the act taken as a whole. Are we not dealing here with the analytic postulate, which asserts that all reality is reducible to a sum of elements? Now, if analysis is the instrument of science, it is also the instrument of humor. If I wish to describe a rugby match and write, “I saw grown men in short trousers fighting and tumbling on the ground to pass a leather ball between two wooden posts,” I have summed up what I saw; yet I have deliberately omitted its meaning—I have made humor.

Mr. Camus’s narrative is analytic and humorous. It lies—as every artist does—by claiming to reproduce naked experience while slyly filtering out all the signifying links, which are also part of experience. This is what long ago Hume did when he declared that in experience one discovers only isolated impressions. It is what neo-realist Americans continue to do today when they deny that there is between phenomena anything other than external relations. Against them, contemporary philosophy has shown that meanings, too, are immediate data. But that would lead us too far. Let it suffice to say that the universe of the absurd man is the analytic world of the neo-realists. Literarily, the procedure has proven itself: it is that of L’Ingénu or of Micromégas; it is that of Gulliver. For the seventeenth century also had its strangers—generally “noble savages” who, transported into an unknown civilization, perceived facts before grasping their meaning. Was not the effect of this dislocation precisely to provoke in the reader the sentiment of the absurd? Mr. Camus seems to recall this on several occasions, particularly when he shows his hero reflecting on the reasons for his imprisonment.

Now it is this analytic procedure that explains the use in The Stranger of the American technique. The presence of death at the end of our road has reduced our future to smoke; our life is “without a tomorrow,” it is a succession of presents. What does this mean but that the absurd man applies his analytic mind to time? Where Bergson saw an indivisible organization, his eye sees only a series of instants. It is the plurality of incommunicable instants that will finally account for the plurality of beings. What our author borrows from Hemingway is thus the discontinuity of his choppy sentences, which mirrors the discontinuity of time. We come then to better understand the cutting of his narrative: each sentence is a present. But not an indefinite present that blurs into and extends the present that follows. The sentence is crisp, without smudges, self-contained; it is separated from the next sentence by a void, just as Descartes’s instant is separated from the next. Between each sentence and the following one the world annihilates itself and is reborn: language, as soon as it is uttered, is a creation ex nihilo; a sentence in The Stranger is an island. And we cascade from sentence to sentence, from void to void.

It is to accentuate the solitude of each phrasal unit that Mr. Camus chose to compose his narrative in the perfect past tense. The defined past is the time of continuity: “He strolled for a long time” calls to mind the pluperfect, a future; the reality of the sentence is the verb—it is the act, with its transitive character, with its transcendence. “He has strolled for a long time” conceals the verbality of the verb; the verb is split in two: on one side lies a past participle that has lost all transcendence, inert as a thing, and on the other the verb “to be,” which carries only the sense of a copula, joining the participle to the noun as an attribute to the subject; the transitive character of the verb has evaporated, the sentence has frozen; its reality now is the noun. Instead of acting as a bridge between the past and the future, it is nothing but a small, isolated substance that is self-sufficient. Moreover, if one takes care to reduce it as much as possible to the main clause, its internal structure becomes of perfect simplicity—and thus gains in cohesion. It is truly an inseparable, an atom of time. Naturally one does not organize sentences among themselves: they are purely juxtaposed; in particular one avoids any causal links, which would introduce into the narrative an embryo of explanation and impose on the pure succession of instants an order other than mere succession. One writes: “A moment later, she asked me if I loved her. I replied that it meant nothing, but that it seemed to me that no. She looked sad. But while preparing lunch, and about nothing in particular, she laughed once again in such a way that I kissed her. It was at that moment that the sounds of an argument broke out at Raymond’s.”

We emphasize two sentences that most carefully conceal any causal link under the pure appearance of succession. When it is absolutely necessary to allude in one sentence to the previous one, words such as “and,” “but,” “then,” “it was at that moment that…” are used—which evoke nothing except pure disjunction, opposition, or mere addition. The relations between these temporal units are external, like those that neo-realism establishes among things; reality appears without being ushered in and disappears without being destroyed—the world collapses and is reborn with each pulse of time. But let us not imagine that it produces itself: it is inert. Any activity on its part would tend to substitute formidable powers for the reassuring disorder of chance. A nineteenth-century naturalist would have written: “A bridge spanned the river.” Mr. Camus refuses anthropomorphism. He would say: “Above the river, there was a bridge.” Thus the thing immediately presents us with its passivity. It is there, simply, undifferentiated: “… There were four black men in the room… in front of the door there was a lady whom I did not know… In front of the door there was the car… Next to it, there was the paymaster…” It was said of Renard that he would eventually write: “The hen lays.” Mr. Camus and many contemporary authors would write: “There is the hen, and it lays.” They love things for themselves; they do not wish to dilute them in the flux of duration. “There is water”: here is a little piece of eternity, passive, impenetrable, incommunicable, glittering—what sensual delight if one can touch it! For the absurd man, it is the sole good in this world. That is why the novelist prefers to an organized narrative that scintillation of little flashes without a tomorrow, each one a moment of voluptuous pleasure; that is why Mr. Camus, in writing The Stranger, may believe that he is silent: his sentence does not belong to the universe of discourse, it has neither ramifications, nor extensions, nor internal structure; it could be defined, like Valéry’s Sylph:

Unseen and unknown:
For the time of a bare breast
Between two shirts.

It is measured very precisely by the time of a silent intuition. Under these conditions, can we speak of a whole that is Mr. Camus’s novel?

Every sentence in his book is equivalent, just as every experience of the absurd man is; each stands on its own and consigns the others to nothingness; yet, except in the rare moments when the author, unfaithful to his principle, indulges in poetry, none stands out against the others. Even the dialogues are integrated into the narrative: dialogue is the moment of explanation, of signification; to give it a privileged place would be to admit that meanings exist. Mr. Camus reduces it, summarizes it, often expresses it in indirect style, denying it any typographical privilege, so that the spoken sentences appear as events akin to the others—glittering for an instant and then disappearing like a flash of heat, like a sound, like a scent. Thus, when one begins to read the book, it does not at first seem that one is in the presence of a novel but rather a monotonous melody—the nasal song of an Arab. One might then think that the book will resemble one of those airs Courteline speaks of, which “go away and never return” and then stop abruptly without any apparent reason. But gradually the work organizes itself before the reader’s eyes; it reveals the solid substructure that supports it. Not a single detail is superfluous, not one that is not later resumed and poured into the debate; and, with the book closed, we understand that it could not have begun otherwise, that it could not have another ending: in this world, presented to us as absurd and from which causality has been meticulously extirpated, not the slightest incident is without weight—each contributes to leading the hero toward the crime and toward capital punishment.

The Stranger is a classic work—a work of order composed regarding the absurd and against the absurd. Is that entirely what the author intended? I do not know; it is my opinion as a reader.

And how shall we classify this work, so dry and crisp, though composed in its apparent disorder, so “human,” so unswervingly transparent once one holds its key? We could scarcely call it a narrative—the narrative explains and coordinates even as it recounts, substituting causal order for mere chronological succession. Mr. Camus calls it a “novel.” And yet a novel demands continuous duration, a becoming, the manifest presence of time’s irreversibility. It is not without hesitation that I would attribute that name to this succession of inert presents which, beneath, reveals the mechanical economy of a constructed edifice. Or else it would be, in the manner of Zadig and Candide, a short novel by a moralist—with a discreet note of satire and ironic portraits—which, despite the influence of German existentialists and American novelists, remains very much in essence akin to a Voltaire tale.

February 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre