Can We Be Out‑of‑Step With the World?
Do you consider yourself a sociable person?
The urge to fit in seems innate to human nature. Conformity brings a sense of security; it keeps us from isolation and often paves the way for achievement.
To blend in, we laugh when others expect us to laugh, and grieve when others expect us to grieve. We end up doing things we resent just to live up to other people’s expectations.
Is there anyone who stands entirely against this impulse? Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’ Nobel‑Prize‑winning novel The Stranger, is exactly such a man. He is an odd figure: he spurns forced sociability and refuses to cater to others. He lives in radical apathy and emotional detachment. True to the book’s title, he is a stranger within his own society.
Though the novel is only sixty thousand words long, it offers profound insights for young readers. Its opening line is iconic and jarring: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.”
Meursault had sent his mother to a nursing home. Others condemned this act as unfilial, yet Meursault believed the nursing home would serve her better. Surrounded by other elderly residents, his mother would not grow lonely.
At his mother’s funeral, he shed no tears and would not look at her one last time. Meursault felt a faint sense of embarrassment. He knew he was supposed to weep, at least according to everyone else. Still, he felt no genuine sorrow. He would not perform emotions or act against his inner truth.
On the vigil night beside his mother’s body, Meursault drank a cup of coffee with milk and smoked a cigarette. To onlookers, this behaviour was incomprehensible. People assumed profound grief should manifest as inability to eat or drink.
His subsequent actions shocked society even further. The next day, he went swimming. There he met Marie, and they hit it off. He invited her to watch a comedy film, and they spent the night together.
Marie was horrified when she learned his mother had just passed away. Meursault considered explaining himself, then decided it was pointless. Everyone is flawed, after all, and society weighs us down with countless unwritten rules.
The day after parting from Marie, Meursault paced around his empty apartment. He reflected that the space had felt comfortably sized while his mother was alive; now it felt vast and hollow. He stood on the balcony for hours, watching passers‑by and gazing up at the sky.
Meursault did love his mother, yet his love was quiet and understated. People express affection in different ways, and not every form of love matches societal expectations. Love itself is subtle and invisible to outsiders. Others saw only his lack of tears, not his private grief and loneliness.
To outsiders, Meursault’s whole existence seemed half‑hearted. When Marie asked whether he wanted to marry her, he replied marriage made no difference to him. When an unpleasant neighbour sought his friendship, he said being friends did not matter either. His boss offered him a promotion and a new life in Paris. Meursault answered that life can never truly be changed, and one life is much like another.
Nothing seemed to matter to him — until disaster struck. Blinded by harsh sunlight, he shot and killed a man. It was an impulsive, accidental act. Even so, he was arrested and imprisoned.
Many acquaintances turned up for his trial. Ironically, the judge and witnesses focused little on the killing itself. Instead, they fixated on Meursault’s conduct at his mother’s funeral: his dry eyes, his refusal to view his mother’s body, drinking coffee and smoking beside the corpse. From these details, they painted him as cold‑blooded and malicious, claiming the shooting must have been premeditated.
For the first time, Meursault realised how deeply people loathed him. For a fleeting moment, he felt guilty. Absurdly, this guilt had almost nothing to do with the accidental homicide. Yet that distinction no longer mattered.
The trial was less a judgement over murder and more an inquisition into whether Meursault had properly loved his mother. It was less a trial of morality than a trial of one man’s soul.
A few voices spoke up for Meursault, noting he had never committed vicious deeds. Their pleas were drowned out by public fury. The prosecutor argued Meursault had buried his mother with the heart of a murderer. He declared Meursault soulless, inhumane, and utterly disconnected from society.
When Meursault tried to explain the shooting had been triggered by the glaring sun, nobody listened. His defence sounded ridiculous. He had become a stranger inside his own trial, even though his life hung in the balance.
Angry and exhausted, Meursault only wanted the proceedings to end so he could return to his cell and sleep. In the end, he was sentenced to death.
Camus’ core philosophical theme is absurdism, and The Stranger brings this idea to life. Meursault was condemned largely because he refused to perform socially‑mandated grief. This conflict exposes how society judges individuals through shared narratives and conventional morality. The protagonist simply accepts life’s absurdity with cold clarity.
Funeral tears may mask complicated feelings toward the deceased, or the quiet reality that two people no longer needed one another. A criminal’s display of remorse can conceal genuine evil and win leniency. Couples repeat “I love you”, whether they mean it or not, to avoid conflict.
Life may become easier through these performances, yet we end up living a counterfeit life that is not truly our own.
The Stranger remains beloved worldwide. Among major translations, the English edition best preserves the original tone. The scene of the shooting, for instance, is framed not as a deliberate human act, but as a collusion of sunlight, sea waves and a yielding trigger. Direct Chinese translations reduce the moment to merely pulling a trigger, losing much of that absurdist weight. Readers who are curious can seek out the English translation.
Meursault remains unwaveringly truthful to himself. He believed one should never play‑act or pretend. Alienated from the crowd, he preferred quiet solitude over performative collective joy.
He loved his mother, but death renders outward gestures meaningless for the dead. There is no inherent reason to oblige mourners to cry at funerals. Forcing him to feign sorrow meant imposing other people’s attitudes toward death and bereavement onto him.
From this perspective, Meursault is profoundly lucid. He refuses to play by society’s unspoken games, and this refusal disturbs those around him. Most people rely on following social conventions to fill inner emptiness and evade their authentic thoughts.
Society tends to ostracise anyone who deviates from the norm and labels them an oddity. Once someone is cast as strange, cruel assumptions and accusations can be levelled against them without hesitation.
Most people live divided lives: their actions seldom align with their inner desires. They fear alienation, rejection and loneliness.
The Stranger does not teach us how to fit into the world. It asks a vital question: when rules, expectations and social masks wrap us layer after layer, will anyone dare, like Meursault, to stay faithful to their authentic self?
As Camus wrote: the absurd cannot be eliminated, yet we gain freedom the moment we face it head‑on.
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