The Stranger

This was a very ill-fitting book to read on my honeymoon. Nonetheless, I loved it. It's a piece of existentialist fiction from the early 1940s, perhaps influenced directly by all the inhumanity of World War II. Its protagonist and title character is a man utterly devoid of what you and I would recognize as human emotions. He is entirely indifferent to the death of his mother, to his impending marriage to a woman, and - minor spoiler - to both a murder he commits and the ensuing trial and punishment he earns. But he is not robotic and unfeeling; he is bothered and soothed by physical situations - days at the beach, sexual gratification, tiredness - the same way you or I would be. It's not that he has no feelings, then, but simply no desire to connect with other people in any way. Nowadays we would probably call him autistic, but I'm pretty sure that kind of condition - or at least the awareness of it - wasn't really in vogue seventy years ago when this book was written.

I've often heard of some stories, and I'm sure you have too, where "it's not what's said, but what isn't said that matters." This usually feels like bullshit to me, a tidy-sounding way to dismiss apathy or shortcomings on the writer's part, but here, it's entirely true by design. At his mother's funeral, for instance, the narrator never once describes himself as sad, mournful, or upset that his mother has died. Instead he is bothered by the hot sun and the long bus ride out to his mother's nursing home. Even when the woman he's casually been seeing proposes marriage, he accepts it without any sort of expression of love for her. At work, he neither shows nor feels any ambition to do his job well or win his boss over. In many ways, the narrator is just kind of "along for the ride" in life.

His situation deteriorates drastically and absurdly in the second half of the book, and in the final chapter he bears out his world view plainly and openly for the first time, and that view is, unsurprisingly, incredibly bleak and depressing. It's atheistic and nihilistic in every sense and the book ends with - spoilers, again - the narrator just completely ready to accept the death he has been condemned to simply because he is aware that everyone dies sooner or later, and really, what's the difference between doing so at thirty or at eighty?

It's all incredibly bleak and it probably wasn't the best book to bring along on my honeymoon, but hey, I had no idea how dark it would end up being. What I found interesting, if a bit off-putting, was how I recognized some of the main character's apathies and indifferences in myself. I mean, I love my wife, and I'd be devastated if my mother died, and I usually care enough about my job to do it to the best of my abilities and all, but still. I've been at funerals or weddings before and felt like I just don't care as much as I should. I've stopped and asked myself what the "point" of all this really is more than once or twice in my life. I've put my own physical comfort and pursuit of simple pleasures over meaningful human connections and small social courtesies plenty of times. But I think we all have. I think that's what makes this book so powerful, in some ways. As people - hell, I'll even narrow that down and say "as men" - I think we're all faced occasionally with the struggle to give a shit, even when we know we should.

Anyway, consider reading this one yourself. My copy was just 120 small-ish pages long and the book was published in 1942 and is thus probably digitally obtainable for free.