The Stranger

The Stranger is a work of fiction—more specifically, a work of philosophical or existentialist fiction.  While many stories attempt to answer questions of philosophical importance, and all good stories shed light on some aspects of the human experience, The Stranger is particularly focused on the absurd: the conflict between a life of no intelligible meaning and a person who desires to understand life's meaning. The absurd, addressed in other works of both fiction and nonfiction by Camus, dominates Camus’s work as an author and The Stranger in particular. Although Camus himself denied the label of existentialist, and absurdism is not precisely an existentialist philosophy, the similarities between Camus and existentialists like Sartre and Kierkegaard leads scholars to group them together regardless.