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The Stranger
Camus's 1942 novel about Meursault — the man who does not weep at his mother's funeral — and the refusal to perform expected emotions that society cannot forgive.
L'Étranger (The Stranger) is Camus's 1942 debut novel and the work that made him famous. Its protagonist, Meursault, is a French Algerian clerk who attends his mother's funeral without weeping, begins a relationship the next day, and later kills an Arab man on a beach in Algiers — less from hatred than from sun, glare, and the physical oppression of the afternoon. At his trial, the court prosecutes him ostensibly for the murder, but the actual case against him is his failure to perform the emotional conventions that society requires as evidence that you are one of its own. Meursault is convicted because he did not weep. In the context of Albert Camus — On AI, Meursault becomes the emblem of the stranger's stance in the AI discourse: the person who refuses to perform either triumphalism or elegy and insists on the braided truth of awe-and-loss.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The novel is short (about 120 pages), flat in affect,