A Man Convicted for Not Crying at His Mother's Funeral — The Stranger

Title: The Stranger Author: Albert Camus Creation Date: 1942 Location: France

Summary

Meursault, a French Algerian clerk, learns of his mother's death. "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." He attends the funeral without visible grief, begins a casual relationship, and becomes entangled with a neighbour's quarrel. On a beach outside Algiers, disoriented by sun and heat, he shoots and kills an Arab man — and then fires four more times into the body. The second half of the novel follows his trial, where he is condemned less for the murder than for his failure to cry at his mother's funeral — for his refusal to perform the emotions society demands. In prison awaiting execution, Meursault achieves a strange serenity, opening himself to "the gentle indifference of the world."

Why This Book Matters

The Stranger is the most concentrated expression of philosophical absurdism in fiction — the idea that human existence has no inherent meaning and that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to human concerns. Camus's novel, published in occupied Paris in 1942, captured the experience of a generation for whom the old certainties — God, progress, civilisation — had collapsed in the catastrophe of world war. Meursault's refusal to lie — to perform grief he does not feel, to claim motivations he does not have — makes him both a philosophical hero and a disturbing figure. The novel also, in ways Camus may not have fully intended, exposes the violence of French colonialism: the murdered man is never named, never individualised, referred to only as "the Arab" — a silence that later writers have powerfully addressed.

Historical Context

Camus wrote The Stranger in 1940-1941, during the fall of France and the beginning of the German occupation. He was a pied-noir — a French Algerian — and the novel is set in French Algeria, a colonial society structured by racial hierarchy. The novel was published in 1942, the same year as Camus's philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which provides the theoretical framework for the novel's absurdism. Camus would soon become active in the French Resistance and go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1957.

Literary Significance

The Stranger's prose — flat, declarative, stripped of metaphor and emotional colouring — was a revolution in French fiction, rejecting the ornate tradition of Proust and the engaged rhetoric of Sartre. Camus's style, influenced by American hardboiled fiction (Hemingway, James M. Cain), created a new mode of existential narrative: the world as experienced by a consciousness that refuses to impose meaning on it. The novel's brevity and apparent simplicity are deceptive — it is among the most carefully constructed works of twentieth-century fiction. Its influence on postwar literature (from Beckett to Houellebecq) is pervasive.

Research Notes

Essential for the post-war period. Chosen as the primary Camus work over The Plague, which is longer and perhaps richer but less formally revolutionary. The Stranger's brevity makes it an ideal entry point for readers encountering existentialist literature. Matthew Ward's 1989 translation restored the famous first line — earlier translations had softened it — and returned the strangeness that is the novel's whole point. The novel's colonial blind spots have become a productive site of critical and creative engagement: Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation is a recommended companion text.

The Reading

Part One

"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know."

The telegram came from the home at Marengo, eighty kilometres from Algiers. Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

My name is Meursault. I am a clerk in a shipping office in Algiers, which is a French city, and I am French, and the men who sit in the doorways of the streets behind the port are Arabs. Maman had been at the home for some years. I hadn't the money to keep her with me. She cried for a while when I sent her and then she got used to it.

I asked my boss for two days off. He didn't look pleased, so I said it wasn't my fault. Afterwards I thought I shouldn't have said that. I borrowed a black tie and a mourning band from Emmanuel and caught the two o'clock bus. It was very hot. I slept most of the way.

The director received me in his office. He said Maman had been happier at the home than with me. I said yes. He asked if I wanted to see her; the caretaker could unscrew the lid. I said no. He asked why not. I said I didn't know. He said, of course, and I felt I had said something I shouldn't. The coffin stood on trestles with the screws already sunk in the lid. The caretaker brought me coffee. Then I wanted a cigarette. I wasn't sure whether I could smoke in front of Maman. I thought it over. It didn't matter. I offered the caretaker one and we smoked. At about ten her friends came in from the dormitories and sat on chairs around the coffin. One of the women wept the whole time, in little screeching sobs, and I wished she would stop.

We buried her the next day. The country was flat and the sun came up quickly. The tar shone and our feet sank a little into it. I felt the blood beating in my temples. Thomas Pérez walked behind us. He had been Maman's friend at the home, and the residents said they were engaged. He was limping in a felt hat and kept falling behind, so he cut across the fields to catch the hearse where the road turned. His face was streaming, tears and sweat together. There was the red earth spilling over the coffin and the white roots mixed in with it, and there was Pérez fainting, folding up like a rag doll. Then the church, the sound of the earth, the night of the bus, and my joy when it was over and I could sleep twelve hours.

The mourners trailing along the white road to Marengo, the small black hearse drawing them on through a glare that nobody can name.

On Saturday I went swimming at the harbour baths and got tangled in the water with Marie Cardona, a typist who had worked in my office. I helped her onto a raft and put my head against her stomach and lay there with the sun on my face. That evening she asked what the mourning was for. I said Maman had died. She wanted to know when, so I said yesterday. She flinched a little but said nothing. We saw a Fernandel picture and laughed at it and she came back to my flat.

Meursault and Marie on the jetty above the harbour — the morning after the funeral, already the world has gone on without comment.

She was gone when I woke. Sunday I stayed on the balcony and watched the street: families in their good clothes, the young men with their hair oiled going to the cinema, then the lamps coming on. It occurred to me that another Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that nothing had really changed.

Marie asked me one evening if I loved her. I said that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't. She looked unhappy. A week later she asked if I wanted to marry her. I said it made no difference to me and we could if she liked. She asked if I'd have said yes to another woman who asked in the same way. I said naturally. She said I was peculiar and that she loved me probably for that. My boss offered me a place in Paris. I said one life was as good as another. He said I lacked ambition.

Raymond Sintès lived on the same floor. He says he is a warehouse guard, and in the neighbourhood they say he lives off women. He gave me blood sausage and wine in his room and told me about a Moorish woman he had been keeping, how he knew she was cheating him, how he'd hit her and she'd bled. He wanted a letter written — something with kicks in it — so she would come back and he could spit in her face and throw her out at the end. He asked if I would write it. I wrote it there and then with the wine in me. He said we were pals now.

Raymond and Meursault at the kitchen table, the bottle between them, the letter being drafted in a silence that asks no questions.

Old Salamano lived on my landing with a spaniel that had a skin disease. He had had the dog eight years, since his wife died, and it had lost its hair and gone the colour of scabs. They went out twice a day and it was always the same: the dog pulling until Salamano stumbled, Salamano beating it and swearing, then the dog pulling again. One evening the dog was gone, run off at the parade ground. Salamano stood in my doorway with his hat in his hands and asked what they would do to it at the pound. I said they kept them three days and then did as they liked. He went in. I heard him walking up and down all night, and through the wall a small strange sound, and he was crying. I don't know why I thought of Maman then.

Old Salamano and his mangy dog on the landing — another tenant in the same building of small cruelties Meursault never quite sees.

The next Saturday the woman was in Raymond's room and there was shouting and a woman screaming, and the landing filled with people. A policeman came, slapped Raymond's face and sent the woman home. Afterwards Raymond asked me to say she had cheated on him. It made no difference to me. I did it.

On the Sunday, Raymond took Marie and me by bus out of Algiers to a wooden bungalow belonging to his friend Masson, at the end of a beach between the rocks and the sea. Masson laughed a great deal and said we would all have lunch. As we left the bus stop Raymond pointed out two Arabs in the road watching us; one of them was the brother of the woman. Marie and I swam. We ate fish and potatoes and drank a lot of wine. Afterwards Masson said he and I would walk on the beach.

The three men walking the wet sand towards the rock at the end of the beach — the first encounter, the air already too bright.

The two Arabs were at the far end, near a spring. When we came up, the brother put his hand in his pocket. Masson took the second one. Raymond hit his man twice and split his mouth, and the brother drew a knife and cut Raymond's arm and slashed his mouth open. We got him to a doctor and brought him back bandaged. Then he went out again, alone, with his revolver in his pocket, and I went after him.

They were at the same place, lying by the spring, and one of them was playing three notes over and over on a little reed. Raymond asked if he should shoot. I said not yet, that he should take him on man to man, and that it was rotten to shoot a man for nothing. Then I said to give me the revolver, that if the other one moved or drew a knife I'd shoot. He gave it to me. The sun struck the metal. Then we walked back and Raymond went into the bungalow.

I couldn't face the wooden steps and the women, so I turned and walked back along the beach with the revolver in my pocket. The sun was the same as it had been the day we buried Maman. It pressed on my head. Every time I felt its breath on my face I clenched my teeth and went on. Behind the rock there was the spring and the shade, and I wanted to reach it. The Arab was lying there. He was alone. When he saw me he raised himself a little and put his hand in his pocket. I put my hand round Raymond's gun in my jacket. We stayed like that a long time. He drew his knife and held it up in the sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a long flashing blade at my forehead. The sweat in my eyebrows came down over my eyelids all at once, a warm thick film. The sky cracked open from end to end and the sea brought a thick fiery breath. The trigger gave.

Meursault on the open sand, the rock and the stranger ahead of him, the sun a white blade pressing down — the second before the shot.

"I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness."

Part Two

They arrested me. My case was simple, they said. My lawyer asked whether I had felt grief that day at the home. I said I had rather lost the habit of examining my feelings, that I had surely loved Maman, but that didn't mean anything, and that all healthy people had more or less wished the death of those they loved. He stopped me and made me promise not to say that at the hearing. He left without shaking my hand.

The magistrate was polite. Then he asked about the four shots. Why had I paused, and then fired four more times into a body on the ground? I did not answer. He asked again, then went to a drawer and came back with a silver crucifix, which he waved at me. Every man who came into that room, he said, had wept before that image. If he ever doubted, his life would have no meaning. Did I want his life to have no meaning? I said that had nothing to do with me. He asked whether I believed in God. I said no. He said he had never seen a soul as hardened as mine, and after that he called me Monsieur Antichrist.

The magistrate at his desk with the crucifix on the wall behind him, Meursault opposite with his hat on his knee — a man being asked to perform a faith he does not have.

The trial was in June. The courtroom was full of light and the fans did nothing to the heat. There were journalists. I had the odd impression of being one too many. Then the parade began, and it was about Maman.

The director of the home said Maman had complained of me, that I had not wanted to see the body, that I had not cried once, and that I had left straight after the burial. One thing had surprised the staff: I hadn't known Maman's age. The caretaker said I had smoked and slept and drunk white coffee. Pérez was asked whether he had seen me cry and said no, and then, asked whether he had seen me not cry, said no again, and there was laughter.

The courtroom under the high windows, witness after witness called to testify not to the murder but to a son's dry eye.

Céleste came in twisting his panama hat and said I was a man, and that everyone knew what that meant. Salamano said I had been kind about his dog. Raymond said the quarrel was chance, and the prosecutor asked whether it was by chance that I had written the letter. Marie was made to give the date of the swim, the film we had laughed at, and the night after it. The prosecutor said that the day after his mother's death this man was swimming and laughing at a comedy film. Marie burst into tears and said it was not what they had made of it, and they took her out.

Nobody asked much about the beach. My lawyer raised his arms and said, come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man, and the prosecutor rose and said that he accused this man of burying his mother with crime in his heart. He said he had looked into my soul and found nothing. When they asked why I had gone back down the beach with the revolver, I said quickly that it was because of the sun. There was laughter. It was as though the case were being conducted without me.

They read the verdict in the evening. In the name of the French people my head was to be cut off in a public square. All the faces were turned to me with the same expression, and I thought this was probably deference.

Prison had not been so bad after the first months. What I missed was cigarettes, and the sea, and women. Then I learned to remember. I would lie on my bunk and go through my flat, every object in it, every mark on the wood. A man who had lived one day could live a hundred years in a cell without being bored. Marie had come once, in a striped dress, and shouted across the grille that we'd be married. I shouted back yes. She did not come again; she was not my wife.

Marie at the visiting hall, separated from Meursault by the double bars — the last warmth from the outside world, already at a remove.

The Cell

In the cell I thought about the machine. It never fails. You climb no scaffold to reach it: it stands on the ground and you walk to it as you would walk to anything. They come for you at dawn. I stopped sleeping and listened for the footsteps, and when the light came and nobody had come, I had another day. Then I would think about the appeal, and then about there being no appeal. It made no difference. Whether you die at thirty or at seventy, others go on living.

The narrow cell with its high window, a shaft of pale light falling across the cot — the room in which a man waits for his sentence and finds, instead, the sky.

The chaplain came without my asking. He sat on the bunk and said the sentence would be lifted but I must discharge a burden, and that men as sure as I was had wept. He called me my son. Then something broke in me. I took him by the collar of his cassock and shouted everything at him. None of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive. He lived like a dead man. I was sure of my life and sure of my death, and that was all I had, and it held me as tightly as this. From the depth of my future a dark wind had been rising towards me all my life long, and as it passed it levelled everything that was offered me. What did it matter that Marie should offer her lips to somebody else, or that his God, or the lives men choose, should be anything at all. One fate was to elect me, and with me thousands of millions of others. The warders pulled him away.

The chaplain standing over the cot, Meursault upright and refusing — the priest pressed back by the only outburst the novel ever permits.

He went, and I slept. I woke with stars on my face, the smells of night and earth and salt cooling my temples, the sirens sounding on the harbour. I thought of Maman, and of why, at the end of her life, she had taken a fiancé, and why she had begun again. Nobody had the right to weep for her. And I felt ready to begin it all again too.

"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again."

Algiers under a sky pouring with stars — the gentle indifference of the world, brother to the man waiting beneath it.

"For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →

Matthew Ward's translation (Vintage International, 1989) restored the famous first line to its proper strangeness and is the recommended English text. Sandra Smith's Penguin Classics translation (2013) is a strong alternative.

By Albert Camus, translated by Matthew Ward. The definitive English translation — the edition that restored the strangeness Camus intended.

By Albert Camus, translated by Sandra Smith. An excellent alternative translation, praised for its contemporary clarity.

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