The redemptive power of absurd walls in The Stranger

Camus’ elusive “novel of the absurd,” The Stranger, has attracted a great deal of social, cultural, political, and psychological readings since its publication in 1942. Yet, when read as Camus intended it - as a philosophical novel which aims to put into images what its philosophical twin, The Myth of Sisyphus, later on put into concepts, we realize that both outline the same inner and intimate journey of the absurd mind. Indeed, the Stranger silently and metaphorically thrusts us into the territory of the absurd, leaving it to the Myth to “illumine the landscape.” Moreover, since Camus himself ascribed to the novel, and to art in general, greater capacities to capture the “feeling of the absurd,” it may even be used as a way to throw more light on the concept of the absurd as presented in the Myth and to better elucidate the myth of the “happy Sisyphus.”

In the following analysis I shall, accordingly, attempt to reveal Camus’ novel as a description of a step-by-step process of the awakening of a dormant consciousness to the reality of the absurd; its initial failure to respond to it; the methodical approach it employs to embrace it, and the consequential inner liberation it achieves. At the heart of the Stranger, I shall claim, lies the same principle that guides the journey of the Myth - that limits, whether they are the Stranger’s concrete prison walls or the Myth’s abstract absurd walls, do not only define human nature, but also hold a surprising redemptive power which is the crux of the absurdist enlightenment. Thus, a close and uncompromising encounter with the borders of our consciousness and life - through Camus’ “method of persistence” - may actually serve as an unexpected key to transcendence and self-transformation.