The Stranger by Albert Camus: Summary, Meursault, and Meaning

“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” The most famous opening line in modern French literature is four words long, and English translators have argued over it for eighty years. Stuart Gilbert, the first, wrote “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” Matthew Ward, in 1988, kept the French word: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” The quarrel seems small until one sees what is at stake. Maman is tender, childlike, intimate; the man who says it goes on to show almost no feeling at his mother’s funeral. From its first sentence, Albert Camus’s novel sets a trap for the reader, and the trap is the question of what a man feels, what he is supposed to feel, and what a society will do to him when the two do not match.

The Stranger, published in Paris in 1942 and known in Britain as The Outsider, is one of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century and the clearest way into Camus’s philosophy of the absurd. It is short, lucid, and endlessly argued over. For half a century it was read as the story of an honest man condemned for refusing to lie; for the last half century it has also been read as a colonial novel in which an Arab is killed and never named. Both readings are true, and a reader in our time needs both. What follows tells the whole story, so readers who want to be surprised should read the novel first. It belongs to our wider guide to existentialism, and it is the companion to our essay on The Myth of Sisyphus.

Eighteen Days in Algiers

The novel has two parts. The first covers about eighteen days and ends with a killing. Meursault, a shipping clerk in Algiers, receives a telegram telling him that his mother has died at an old people’s home in Marengo, some eighty kilometers away. He takes the bus there, sits through the night’s vigil beside the coffin, smokes, drinks coffee with milk, and dozes. At the funeral, under a crushing sun, he notices the heat, the sweat on his face, the old man named Pérez who had been his mother’s companion at the home and who limps after the hearse and faints. He does not cry. The next day, back in Algiers, he goes swimming, meets Marie Cardona, a typist who used to work in his office, takes her to a comedy at the cinema, and takes her to bed.

The following days are told in the same flat, sensual present: the Sunday spent on his balcony watching the street, the meals at Céleste’s restaurant, the neighbors. Old Salamano beats and curses his mangy dog and then weeps when it runs away. Raymond Sintès, a warehouse man whom everyone assumes is a pimp, asks Meursault to help him write a letter to lure back his Arab mistress so that he can punish her, and Meursault writes it, not out of loyalty or malice but because he sees no reason not to. Raymond beats the woman; the police are called; her brother and his friends begin to follow Raymond. Marie asks Meursault whether he loves her, and he says that it doesn’t mean anything, but that he probably doesn’t. When she asks him to marry her, he says yes, it makes no difference to him. When his employer offers him a post in Paris, he says that one life is as good as another.

The Four Shots

On a Sunday in summer, Meursault, Marie, and Raymond go to a friend’s beach house outside the city. There is a scuffle with the Arabs on the sand, and Raymond is cut. Later, alone, dazed by the heat and the glare, Meursault walks back along the beach, toward a spring behind a rock where he hopes to find shade, and finds the brother of Raymond’s mistress lying there. The man draws a knife. The sun flashes on the blade, the sweat runs into Meursault’s eyes, the sky seems to split open and rain fire, and his hand closes on the revolver Raymond gave him. He fires. Then, after a pause, he fires four more times into the motionless body, and, in Ward’s translation, “it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.”

The scene is the most discussed in the book because Camus refuses to explain it. Meursault has no motive the court can recognize and offers none himself; the closest he comes, at his trial, is to say that it was because of the sun, and the courtroom laughs. The novel is honest about the strangeness. It gives us the heat, the light, the glare on the knife, the body’s sensations, and no reason, and it leaves the reader in the position the jury will soon be in, wanting a story that would make sense of the act. The four extra shots are the hardest detail of all. One shot might be panic; four more, after a pause, are something else, and the novel never says what.

A Trial About a Funeral

The second part covers the year that follows, in prison and in court. Meursault adapts to his cell with strange ease. He learns to sleep long hours and to pass the time by remembering every object in his old room, and he concludes that a man who had lived only a single day could easily live a hundred years in prison. The examining magistrate, a believer, waves a crucifix at him and is baffled when Meursault says he does not believe in God. His lawyer is irritated that he will not pretend to have felt grief at the funeral.

The trial, when it comes, turns out to be less about the killing than about his character. The director of the old people’s home testifies that Meursault did not wish to see his mother’s body and did not cry; the caretaker, that he smoked and drank coffee by the coffin; Marie, under questioning, that the day after the funeral they went swimming and saw a comic film. The prosecutor builds his case on these facts and declares that Meursault buried his mother with the heart of a criminal. Witnesses who come to speak for him, Céleste, Salamano, Raymond, only make things worse. The jury finds him guilty, and the president of the court announces that he will be beheaded in a public square in the name of the French people.

The satire is sharp and, it must be said, sometimes heavy. The prosecutor and the magistrate are drawn with less subtlety than anyone else in the book, and the argument that Meursault is condemned for not weeping rather than for killing is pressed so hard that it risks letting the reader forget that a man is dead. That risk, as later critics would point out, is not only an artistic one.

The Chaplain and the Stars

Awaiting execution, Meursault refuses three times to see the prison chaplain. When the chaplain comes anyway and urges him to turn to God, he explodes, seizes the priest by the collar, and pours out the first true passion he has shown in the novel: nothing matters, every life is condemned, the chaplain’s certainties are not worth one hair of a woman’s head. Afterwards, emptied and calm, he lies on his bunk and hears the sounds of the countryside through the window, and for the first time he opens himself, in Ward’s translation, to “the gentle indifference of the world.” Finding it so like himself, he realizes that he has been happy, and that he is happy still. He thinks of his mother and understands at last why, near the end of her life, she took a “fiancé” at the home. His last wish is that there will be a large crowd at his execution, and that they will greet him with cries of hate.

The ending is the novel’s philosophy made visible, and it is also its most debated passage. Gilbert rendered the key phrase as “the benign indifference of the universe,” and the French, la tendre indifférence du monde, carries a tenderness neither English version quite holds. Some readers find the ending a triumph, the moment a man stops waiting for meaning from outside and accepts the world as it is. Others find it a little too beautiful, a lyrical consolation that the cold first half of the book had seemed to forbid. Both are responding to something real. Camus wanted his hero to die lucid and unreconciled, and he also could not resist giving him the sea and the stars.

Who Is Meursault?

Meursault is one of the most argued-over characters in modern fiction, and the argument begins with what is missing in him. He does not lie, but he does not explain himself either. He feels physical sensations intensely, the heat, the water, the light, Marie’s body, but he does not feel the emotions society expects of him, or pretend to. Readers have called him a psychopath, a saint, a blank, a mirror.

Camus himself offered the most famous reading. In a preface written in 1955 for an American university edition, he said that Meursault is condemned because he refuses to play the game, refuses to lie about his feelings, and that he had tried to draw in his character “the only Christ we deserve.” The phrase is provocative and has been quoted ever since, but it should be read beside the novel rather than in place of it. The man who writes Raymond’s letter, lets him beat a woman, and fires five shots into another man is hard to call a Christ, and many critics have argued that the preface makes Meursault nobler than the book does. Jean-Paul Sartre, in an essay of 1943 that was one of the first serious readings the novel received, saw something else: a man described from outside, sentence by isolated sentence, as if each moment had no connection to the next, the absurd rendered as a way of writing. The most honest reading holds all three. Meursault is truthful, and he is also cold; he is condemned unjustly, and he has also killed a man.

The People Around Him

The novel’s minor characters are few and sharply drawn, and each throws light on Meursault by contrast. Marie Cardona is warm and alive, wants to marry him, and stands by him at the trial, where her honesty helps to convict him. Raymond Sintès, violent and sentimental, draws Meursault into his quarrel and gives him the gun. Salamano, the old neighbor who abuses his dog and weeps when it runs away, is a small parable of love disguised as cruelty, and one of the book’s most moving figures. Céleste, the restaurant owner, can only say at the trial that it was bad luck, and is the one witness who sees the killing as a misfortune rather than a crime. Thomas Pérez, the old man who loved Meursault’s mother at the end of her life, is the novel’s quiet image of the feeling Meursault cannot show. And then there is the man on the beach, who has no name at all.

The Absurd, and the Myth of Sisyphus

The Stranger is the novel of what Camus called the absurd: the confrontation between the human hunger for meaning and a universe that offers none. Meursault lives as though he already knows the universe is indifferent; the society around him lives as though it were not, and demands that he share its consolations, the grief at the funeral, the repentance in the cell, the God in the magistrate’s hand. Camus developed the same idea in essay form in The Myth of Sisyphus, published a few months later, and in his play Caligula; together they make up what he called the cycle of the absurd. The paradox at the heart of all three is the same: the certainty of death, far from making life meaningless, makes the present moment the only thing that matters, and a man condemned to die can discover, as Meursault does, that he has been happy. Readers who want the philosophy laid out directly should read our guide to what absurdism is.

The Man on the Beach Has No Name

For decades, readers barely noticed that the man Meursault kills has no name. Later critics did. In 1970 the Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien argued that the novel reflects the blind spots of French colonial Algeria, where the Arab majority appears only as a menace and a target, and Edward Said pressed the argument further in Culture and Imperialism (1993). The trial, these critics observe, treats the killing of an Arab almost as a side issue beside the scandal of a dry-eyed son. The Arab woman Raymond beats is unnamed too, and so are the men on the sand. Camus, who grew up poor among Arabs and Europeans in Belcourt and spent his life arguing for justice in Algeria, did not see it. His defenders point out that the novel’s indifference is Meursault’s, not necessarily its author’s. The criticism stands anyway, because a novel is responsible for what it chooses to see.

In 2013 the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud answered the book directly. His The Meursault Investigation, translated by John Cullen in 2015, is narrated by the brother of the man Meursault killed, who gives his dead brother a name, Musa, and a mother, and tells the story from the other side of the beach, in a bar in Oran, decades after independence. It won the Prix Goncourt for a first novel in 2015, and Daoud went on to win the Prix Goncourt itself in 2024. Read together, the two books are a remarkable conversation across seventy years about who gets to be a person in a story and who is left as part of the scenery, and our guide to contemporary French novels places Daoud in his own tradition.

How Camus Wrote It

Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, in French Algeria, and grew up in poverty in the working-class Algiers district of Belcourt, raised by a nearly deaf mother who could not read and a harsh grandmother; his father had been killed in the First World War. The sun and sea of The Stranger are the Algiers of his youth. He drafted the novel between 1938 and 1940, finishing it in Paris in the spring of 1940, weeks before the German invasion, and it was published by Gallimard in May 1942, in occupied France, with a small first printing and paper rationed. Its success was quick, and it made Camus famous at twenty-eight. He went on to write The Plague, The Fall, and The Rebel, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at forty-four, and was killed in a car accident in January 1960. He rejected the label existentialist throughout his life, and his break with Sartre is told in the quarrel that divided existentialism.

Which Translation to Read

The opening line is the test. Stuart Gilbert’s translation of 1946, “Mother died today,” was the only one for forty years; it is fluent but has long been criticized for smoothing Camus’s flat, deliberate sentences into something more conventional, and it adds explanations Camus left out. Matthew Ward’s translation of 1988, “Maman died today,” keeps the French word for its intimacy, follows Camus’s plainness closely, and is the standard American version. Sandra Smith’s translation of 2012, published by Penguin in Britain as The Outsider, begins “My mother died today,” and has been praised for its attention to the novel’s rhythms and to the religious echoes of the ending. For most readers, Ward in the United States or Smith in Britain is the right choice. The original is also within reach of anyone with a few years of school French, because Camus’s sentences are famously short and plain.

The Stranger on Film

Luchino Visconti filmed the novel in 1967, with Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault, a faithful and rather stately adaptation that Camus’s heirs had insisted keep close to the book. In 2025 the French director François Ozon released a new black-and-white version, L’Étranger, with Benjamin Voisin as Meursault and Rebecca Marder as Marie, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and opened in American and British cinemas in the spring of 2026, renewing interest in the novel for a new generation.

The Gentle Indifference of the World

Maman, so tender, spoken by a man who seems to feel so little, is the word the whole novel answers. By the end the reader understands that Meursault’s coldness was never quite what it seemed. In his cell, on his last night, he finally opens himself to the world, the stars, the smell of earth and salt, the sounds of the countryside, the indifference of a universe that offers no meaning and no punishment, and he feels for the first time at home in it. He thinks of his mother and understands why she took a fiancé at the end of her life, and in that understanding is the closest thing to love the novel allows. It is a beautiful ending, and it should not let us forget the man on the beach, who also had a mother, and whose name we learned only seventy years later, from someone else’s book.