"the stranger" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

HORS D'OEUVRE Appetizer served before a meal.

MAGISTRATE Civil officer empowered to enforce the law.

MOOR Member of a Muslim people of mixed Arab and Berber descent, living in north Africa.

PANAMA Straw hat.

PANNIKIN Small pan or metal cup.

PARRICIDE Person who murders either or both of his or her parents; the act itself.

REFECTORY Dining hall in an institution, particularly in a monastery or convent.

ROSETTE Ribboned ornament in the shape of a rose. Worn in the buttonhole by veterans to indicate the possession of medals such as the Legion of Honor.

SPIRIT LAMP Lamp using alcohol or other liquid fuel.

TO TRENCH To dig into a subject and cover it thoroughly.

TRESTLE Frame consisting of a horizontal beam fastened to two pairs of spreading legs, used to form a table.

VENDETTA Blood feud in which the relatives of a murdered or injured person seek revenge on the murderer or members of his or her family.


^^^^^^^^^^THE STRANGER: REACTIONS TO THE STRANGER

The Stranger was wholly the product of Camus' experiences, and the Parisian reader could not have shared them. All he could do was to recognize that a new dimension was being added to his literature, ushered in by a frightening gong: "four short blows that I struck at the gate of misfortune." In the first major review of The Stranger, Sartre would recognize its existential quality, a historian would see it as the symbol of the Algerian Frenchman isolated in his Moslem milieu. Much later, a hostile Algerian would decide that in killing the Arab, Camus (or his hero) subconsciously acted out the dream of the pied noir who loved Algeria but without Moslem Algerians. A Finnish economic geographer would tell the author of this book that he saw in the beach scene, when sunstruck Meursault pulled the trigger, a textbook example of the effect of climate on population.

-Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus, 1979

^^^^^^^^^^THE STRANGER: CAMUS ON THE ABSURD

Camus claims that the feeling of the absurd is something of which we find evidence not only in literature but in daily conversation and ordinary contacts with other people. The absurd may be experienced quite spontaneously without preparation of the mind or senses. Its revelation of itself to certain individuals is as arbitrary as the operation of divine grace for a believer in predestination. Generally, however, a sense of the absurd is most likely to arise in one or more of four different ways. Firstly, the mechanical nature of many individuals' lives, the deadening routine that marks them, may one day cause some of these individuals to question the value and purpose of their existence. Awareness of the absurd finds its second possible source in an acute sense of time passing--a sense of time as the destructive element. Thirdly, the absurd arises from that sense of dereliction in an alien world which people feel in varying degrees. Lastly, we may possibly experience the absurd through an acute sense of our fundamental isolation from other human beings.

-John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and
the Literature of Revolt, 1960

^^^^^^^^^^THE STRANGER: MEURSAULT AND THE NATURAL WORLD

Meursault's awareness of the colors, lights and sensations of the external world is so acute as to recall at times a mystical experience. Objects exist for him in their absolute newness as they exist for the illuminate. He delights in existence such as he finds it, and each detail is for him infinitely important. This importance of physical existence is, in The Stranger, part of the expression of the absurdity of the world. When no emotions or ideas have any significance, physical events alone are capable of influencing a man and making him act. It is not hatred, envy, greed, revenge, or honor which makes Meursault kill the Arab, but simply the effect of the sun. This is the only explanation which he can give of his act, and since he is not very good at expressing himself, it is one which society cannot understand or accept.

-Philip Thody, Albert Camus, 1959

^^^^^^^^^^THE STRANGER: CAMUS ON RELIGION

We come to understand the thought of Albert Camus only after we have probed the full significance of his optimism about and his pessimism about human destiny. For this throws us back to the abiding evidence of evil in human existence. For the Christian the ultimate character of the universe is good, and in this he finds his hope and the ability to transcend and accept, to a degree, the evil in the world. But what, at this point, has become clear about the thought of Camus is that for him the ultimate character of the universe is evil and that consequently men are always uncertain and always threatened; whatever goodness there be in life, it is in men, and this goodness is created only in the struggle of men to preserve and enlarge this area of goodness which they alone know and which they alone can guarantee.

-Thomas L. Hanna, "Albert Camus and the Christian Faith,"