The exact opposite of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, it is a book ostensibly about a murder and the morality of murdering a human being, but in the end denies that life has any special meaning for anybody. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment murders a pawnbroker he knows intimately, and who he knows makes the world a worse place. He realizes the error of his ways before being sent to prison, and decides that life has a moral value, and that there are no supermen who have have the right to take it away to improve the world, as Hegel's World Historical Man or Nietzsches Übermensch would.
Camus turns this upside down, as the protagonist Mersault kills a man he doesn't know, an arab, for no reason. Mersault is the kind of person who denies any meaning to anybody and only learns a value to life when facing execution. The society around him from the court trying to prosecute him and his lawyer try to give rational meaning to his actions when there is none. It is interesting that the only rational thinking occurs right before his execution, and he even himself admits that if he was successfully appealed he would again become irrationally exuberant with the delusion he can escape death. When he gives up the delusion that he can escape death, he finally finds happiness.
It is interesting that this is considered an existentialist book, since Camus denied he was an existentialist. It is through the absurd that Camus finds a way to escape the meaningless and totality of existence. The absurdity of the trial is when the court tries to use Mersault's behavior after his mothers death as proof of ill will since we the reader through the eyes of Mersault see these events as making the best of a miserable situation, life.
A very slender novel, that must be read in full to appreciate. The ending conversation with the chaplain makes it one of the best novels of all time.
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