Reading The Outsider (also known as The Stranger) by Albert Camus felt surprisingly personal. I found myself relating to Meursault’s character as someone who doesn’t express emotions in ways that society expects, and who chooses silence over explanation. I’ve often been seen as cold or lacking empathy just because I don’t speak openly about my feelings. But that doesn’t mean those feelings aren’t there.
Camus’s portrayal of Meursault reminded me how society tends to force everyone into rigid molds. There’s this unspoken standard how we “should” behave, react, feel. But there are over eight billion people in the world today, each with a different emotional language and way of being. Why should one narrow standard define what’s acceptable? Even worse, it determines how those people are treated in the eyes of a law that should be delivering justice.
Like Meursault, I’ve felt the quiet frustration of being misunderstood, of not wanting to fight back against systems that already feel absurd and broken. Not because I don’t care, but because the fight itself feels pointless at times.
To me, The Outsider is about how society, the so-called “norm,” treats those it doesn’t understand as strangers. And often, the harshest judgments come from those who barely know us.
My Favorite Bits
- I listened and realized I was considered intelligent. But I didn’t understand how the natural qualities of an ordinary man could be turned into overwhelming proof of his guilt.
- I didn’t really regret what I had done that much. But such viciousness astounded me. I would have liked to explain to him, politely, almost with a hint of emotion, that I was always preoccupied by what was about to happen, either today or tomorrow. But given the position I was in, I couldn’t actually speak to anyone that way. I didn’t have the right to show I had feelings or good intentions.
- I was overwhelmed by memories of a life that I could no longer claim as mine, a life which had offered me the most subtle but most persistent of joys.
- .. everyone knows that life isn’t really worth living. In the end, I knew that it didn’t matter much whether you died at thirty or at seventy, because in either case other men and women would of course go on living, it would be like that for thousands of years.
- I started shouting at the top of my lungs and swore at him and told him not to pray for me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I poured out all the feelings that surged up from the depths of my heart in waves of anger and joy. He seemed so sure of himself, didn’t he? But not one of his certainties was worth a single stand of a woman’s hair. He wasn’t even sure he was alive because he lived life as if he were dead. I may look ad if I had nothing but I was sure of myself, sure of everything, sure of life, sure of my impending death. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had a hold on that truth as much as it had a hold on me. I’d been right, I was still right, I had always been right. I had lived my ofe a certain way when i could have lived it another way. I had done one thing when I might have done something else. What difference did it make? I felt as if I had been waiting all this time for this very moment and this early dawn when I would be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered and I knew very well why. He also knew why. From the depths of my future, throughout all this absurd life I had lived, a gathering wind swept towards me, stripping bare along its path everything that had been possible in the years gone by, years that seemed just as unreal as the ones that lay ahead. Why should the death of other people or a mother’s love matter so much? Why should I care about his god, the lives, the destinies we choose when one unique destiny had chosen me, and along with me millions and millions of privileged others who, like him, called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he understand, could he really not understand? Everyone was privileged. There was no one who wasn’t privileged. All those others, they too would one day be condemned to death.
Author: Albert Camus
First published: 19 May 1942
Number of pages: 119 pages
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