The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.
Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson
]]>Allégorie des idéologies de masse, le rhinocéros, cruel et dévastateur, ne se déplace qu'en groupe et gagne du terrain à une vitesse vertigineuse. Seul et sans trop savoir pourquoi, Bérenger résiste à la mutation. Il résiste pour notre plus grande délectation, car sa lutte désespérée donne lieu à des caricatures savoureuses, à des variations de tons et de genres audacieuses et anticonformistes. La sclérose intellectuelle, l'incommunicabilité et la perversion du langage engendrent des situations tellement tragiques qu'elles en deviennent comiques, tellement grotesques qu'elles ne peuvent être que dramatiques.
On a dit du théâtre de Ionesco qu'il était engagé ; il l'est, en faveur de l'individu, menacé de marginalisation quand, malgré ses faiblesses, il parvient à résister aux tentations avilissantes qu'il a lui-même fait naître. --Sana Tang-Léopold Wauters
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