The Stranger in Never too Late to Read Classics

May 16, 2015 Eva Siagian rated it liked it · review of another edition

Bukankah kebanyakan kita semua pernah merasakan yang dirasakan Meursault? Dan bukankah lebih banyak lagi kita memang hidup dengan caranya.. Pembedaan terletak pada iman (sebut saja agama).. Jadi yang mengikat masyarakat kita dengan kesadaran yang lebih riil adalah iman. Meski saya kurang paham dengan apa yang hendak disampaikan penulis, dikatakan bahwa gaya hidup Meursault ini dikatakan gaya hidup tropik.. Bukankah Indonesia negara tropik, we live like everybody live.. that's what society do. Be ...more

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Jun 30, 2015 Jennalyn rated it really liked it

Shelves: philosophy, french-literature, own-physical-copy

*Disclaimer: This is more a rambling reflection on why this book left me so conflicted. So if you're expecting a real review instead of a long-winded, personal, completely subjective ramble, look elsewhere.

I'm not totally sure what to do with this book. Stylistically it's beautiful. Narratively it's simplistic. Philosophically it's intriguing and fascinating and I disagree with it nearly 100%. I spent the first half of the book becoming increasing disgusted by the narrator, but then found myself *Disclaimer: This is more a rambling reflection on why this book left me so conflicted. So if you're expecting a real review instead of a long-winded, personal, completely subjective ramble, look elsewhere.

I'm not totally sure what to do with this book. Stylistically it's beautiful. Narratively it's simplistic. Philosophically it's intriguing and fascinating and I disagree with it nearly 100%. I spent the first half of the book becoming increasing disgusted by the narrator, but then found myself rooting for him because I was dismayed that everyone misunderstood him so thoroughly (including, I think, himself. He has a weird version of self-awareness that comes and goes - sometimes he seems to know himself deeply, yet at other times he seems to be completely blind and in denial...and he admits that "I had pretty much lost the habit of analyzing myself," which may explain some of the blindness to his abdication of his own agency in life). At times I hated the guy, but I couldn't stop reading because I was engrossed by his thoughts and his perspective on the world. So I like this book a lot, and plan to re-read it someday, but I also think Camus is off base and Meursault has a psychological disorder. I spent most of my reading scribbling notes in the margin that argue with Meursault and pointing out every time he subconsciously contradicted his "nothing matters" philosophy.

I think, perhaps, there are two problems for me as I read this book. First, I'm not an atheist. So I related to the priest at the end, not Meursault. I found him willfully ignorant in that he is "not interested" so he won't even consider the priest's perspective. Honestly, it was the "not interested" line that bothered me most. Because it's each individual's responsibility to take an interest and develop an interest in new ideas, whether spiritual or otherwise - and Meursault denies that responsibility. And his proclamation that "I had been right, I was still right, I was always right" grates on me. His attitude is one of willful ignorance - an arrogance that implies you don't have to think about your position or be interested in any ideas but your own, simply because you are right. It is the same kind of intellectual immaturity I often see in the students I teach (18-year-olds, mostly...and they also use the "I'm not interested" excuse to refuse to look at things from alternate perspectives). So it sets me off, but I'm willing to accept this may just be my personal pet peeve. And again, my foundational beliefs (which I have questioned and doubted, but always somehow come back to) do not allow me to accept a world in which there is no higher power and no afterlife. While life often feels meaningless to me, I always come back to a strange search for meaning. And if there is truly no meaning in the world, I don't know where I would have found the idea that there was, or why the search for it is so important in my life (and the lives of countless philosophers).

This brings me to the second problem I encountered. Reading The Stranger barely a week after finishing Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning left me primed to disagree with all of this "meaninglessness" stuff. While I sympathize with the feeling of meaninglessness (again, I have felt this way often), I tend to think that Meursault's apathy and indifference create a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle. Life is meaningless because he is too passive to create meaning in his life. That is, after all, what Frankl (who had far less freedom, and far greater cause for despair and apathy than Meursault) concluded - that each individual is responsible for creating their own unique meaning in their own life, whether that be through creating a work or doing a deed, through experiencing something or encountering someone (i.e. the experience of beauty in art, nature, and humanity), or through the attitude that we take when faced with suffering.

So yes - I enjoyed The Stranger, I'm fascinated by it, frustrated by it, can easily see why it is so influential, and plan to re-read it in the future. But I can't read it without feeling conflicted. And that feeling of conflict actually feels pretty healthy to me. ...more

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