Albert Camus explored absurdity and the meaning of human existence in his works. In The Stranger and The Fall, Camus ponders the absurd situations faced by human beings and the nature of life in them, asking important questions about human existence.

 

A brief introduction to Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born in 1913 in the small Algerian town of Mondovi. His father, a farm laborer, was killed in action in 1914, and his mother was a Spanish woman. The family was poor, and Camus worked several jobs, including an auto parts dealer, an employee of the Algerian viceroy, a meteorologist, and a shipping broker, before completing his graduate studies. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, but then contracted tuberculosis and had to abandon his teaching qualifications.
As a student, he organized a theater company called “The Theater of Work” and became an actor and director himself. He adapted several plays, including Camus’ own The Revolt of the Asturians, about the riots of the Oviedo gangsters, and several others that were banned by the authorities. Other adaptations include Andre Marlowe’s The Age of Contempt, Bildrak’s The Merchant Ship Tenacity T, Ben Johnson’s The Silent Woman, and his stage performance as Ivan in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
He then moved to Paris, first to Algiers and then to Algiers City, where he worked as a journalist until World War II, when he devoted himself to the independence movement against Germany, and at the time of the liberation of France, he became the chief editor of Combat, where he remained until his resignation in 1945, his brilliant editorials being published in Actuelles Ⅲ.
After the war, his activities continued in a remarkable way. In particular, he defended those who had suffered persecution and servitude and encouraged the many victims who fell in the struggle for freedom. During the devastating Algerian War, he was at the forefront of appeals for an armistice and was active in the abolitionist movement.
Camus published The Stranger (1942) at the instigation of Andre Marlowe, and it was followed by The Myth of Sisyphus (1943), also published by the prestigious Galimard. After the war, he wrote two successful plays, The Misunderstanding and Caligula, which were staged in 1945 and 1946, respectively. His post-war plays were The State of Siege (1948) and Les Justes People (1949). In 1946, he visited the United States, and the subsequent publication of The Plague established him as one of the most important writers of the postwar generation. In 1951, the essay “The Rebel” was published.

 

A brief introduction to The Stranger

Published a year before The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger is a philosophical interpretation of nihilism. It’s not a simple story, and the reader must turn their eyes to the profound ideas behind its concrete forms.
At first glance, however, the novel is just a story with characters, a setting, and a storyline, like so many other novels. The main character, Meursault, is an ordinary clerk. One day, his mother’s death telegram arrives unexpectedly, and he attends her funeral in the heat of the day. That day, he has a relationship with a woman named Marie, who later befriends a gangster. He gets into trouble because of his friendship with the thug, and finally, he shoots and kills an Arab man. He is convicted and awaits execution…….
It seems like a simple story, but we realize that it condenses a dense world of nothingness.
Meursault’s life is meaningless. This is the central theme of the novel. His life is not directed toward any purpose, nor is it organized around any ideology; it simply unfolds blindly and automatically. He is a human being who knows neither love nor remorse nor joy. The most human emotions cannot shake him. Neither his mother’s death nor Marie’s love can bring Meursault out of his passive, dull, exhausted paralysis. The Stranger is a novel about nothingness, but it is not a novel that ends in nothingness. Meursault finally wakes up from the heavy ‘sleep of the everyday’ by explosively rebelling against it.
Initially blended into the ugly blind automatism of “everyday life,” he has finally “seized his freedom,” resisted the “temptation of hope” to put it back down, and, faced with death, instinctively chooses “rebellion” over suicide. In return, he is rewarded with a life rich in sensations and a surprisingly exquisite taste for the here and now.

From Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus

“Nihilism is the consciousness of death and at the same time its denial.It is that absurd shoelace which appears at the very end of the last thoughts that come to the head of the condemned man (just a few meters before that dizzying self-fall), which he cannot help but look at.The opposite of the suicidal is the condemned man.”

When The Stranger was published, it was hailed as a literary triumph of existentialism. It was Camus’s The Stranger and Sartre’s series of philosophical theories that led to the rise of existentialism in the world around World War II. Camus was not an existentialist, but he was part of the trend.
Sartre called The Stranger “a dry, clean work, an apparently disordered work, but a well-constructed work, and a very human work.”
The above commentary is taken from Robert de Luppé’s Albert Camuson, in which he discusses The Stranger. Dr. Luppé is a professor of philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, where he won the French Academy Award for his dissertation on “Liberation by Literature. He specializes in modern philosophy and literature, and this is his first book.

 

A brief introduction to The Fall

The Fall was published in 1955, when Camus was 41 years old, after he had retired from all political activities and returned to journalism.
More than any of his other works, The Fall is imbued with the excellence of nihilism.
In a dreary, dank, hellish place with dark, shimmering canals and flocks of pigeons flying high above, the protagonist, Climence, is relentlessly recounting how he came to be.
One night, as he crosses a bridge over the Seine, he passes a woman jumping into the water without seeing or saving her, and he is haunted by an unexplained laughter.
The laughter, however, causes Klamath to reflect on his past, and he finally realizes that all his fame and virtue have been a lie, born of hypocrisy.
He also reveals the guilt of modern people who judge the sins of others while convinced of their own innocence, inferring that we are all similarly guilty.
Through this work, Camus draws a portrait of modern man who is obsessed with absurdities and contradictions, emphasizing that this is exactly how we live today.
The constant laughter in Klamath’s mind may also be the sound of a form that awakens the true self. It may be the sound of his own voice that he cannot help but hear even when he tries not to.