The experience of strangeness and the contradiction of the absurd in the Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger

Abstract

This article is an aesthetic analysis of how the philosopher-artist Albert Camus’s perspective on the absurd is developed in his novel The Stranger. I examine here how certain philosophical theses of the Franco-Algerian author on the subject unfold in an artistic composition, how they are articulated in the structure of a novelist prose. I establish as the foundations of my analysis the experience of strangeness present in the feeling of the absurd and the contradictory formulation present in the expression of the absurd in The Stranger. For that, I write this article articulating a counterpoint between Sartre's well-known criticism Explanation of The Stranger and the comments of more recent authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Angela Binda and Manuel da Costa Pinto.

Keywords: Camus. Romance. Absurd. estrangement. Foreign.