Albert Camus explored the meaning of human existence within absurdity through his works. In The Stranger and The Fall, he deeply reflects on the absurd situations humans face and the essence of life within them, posing crucial questions about human existence.

Albert Camus Brief Introduction

Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, a small town in Algeria. His father, a farm laborer, was killed in action in 1914; his mother was of Spanish descent. Due to his family’s limited means, he worked various jobs—including at an auto parts store, for the Algerian Governorate, at the meteorological office, and as a shipping broker—while completing his graduate studies. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy but later contracted tuberculosis, forcing him to abandon his teaching certification exams.
During his student years, he organized a theater troupe called ‘The Theatre of Work,’ becoming both an actor and its director, immersing himself in theater. He adapted several plays, and his own work, ‘The Asturian Rebellion,’ about the miners’ revolt in Oviedo, along with several others, were banned by the authorities. He also adapted and staged works like André Malraux’s ‘The Age of Contempt’, Bildrock’s ‘The Merchant Ship Tenacity T’, and Ben Johnson’s ‘The Silent Woman’. He passionately performed the role of Ivan on stage in Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’.
Later, he first worked as a journalist in Algiers, then moved to Paris. During this time, he encountered World War II and threw himself into the resistance movement against Germany. Around the time of France’s liberation, he served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper *Combat*, and his outstanding editorials, which captured the world’s attention until his resignation in 1945, are included in
His activities continued brilliantly even after the war ended. He particularly championed those suffering under oppression and subjugation, encouraging the many victims who fell in the struggle for freedom. During the brutal Algerian War, he spearheaded appeals for a ceasefire and actively participated in the campaign to abolish the death penalty.
Through André Malraux’s arrangement, Camus published The Stranger (1942) with the renowned Gallimard publishing house, followed by The Myth of Sisyphus (1943) with the same publisher. After the war, his plays The Misunderstanding and Caligula were staged in 1945-46, achieving success. Among his postwar works, The State of Siege (1948) and The Just (1949) were staged. In 1946, he visited the United States. Following the publication of The Plague, he instantly gained renown as one of the major figures of the postwar generation. In 1951, his essay The Rebel was published.

A Brief Introduction to The Stranger

Published a year before The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger can be described, in a word, as a philosophical interpretation of nihilism. It is not merely a simple story; the reader must turn their attention to the profound ideas behind its concrete forms.
Yet at first glance, this novel appears like countless others—merely a story with characters, setting, and plot. The protagonist, Meursault, is an ordinary clerk. One day, a telegram suddenly arrives announcing his mother’s death. He dispassionately arranges her funeral in the heat. That same day, he has a relationship with a woman named Marie and later becomes friends with a petty criminal. Because of this acquaintance, he gets caught up in trouble, and eventually, he shoots and kills an Arab man. He is sentenced and awaits execution…
Though it seems like a simple story, one comes to realize that within it lies a world of profoundly concentrated nihilism.
Meursault’s life is meaningless. This is the novel’s central theme. His life is not directed toward any purpose, nor is it organized around any ideology. It simply unfolds blindly and automatically. He is a man who knows neither love, regret, nor joy. Even the most human emotions fail to shake him. Neither his mother’s death nor Marie’s love can pull Meursault out of his passive, dull, and weary paralysis. While The Stranger is a novel about nihilism, it does not ultimately end in nihilism. Meursault finally ‘awakens from the heavy slumber of everyday life’ by exploding into rebellion.
Initially blended into the blind automatism of ‘everyday life’ to an almost repulsive degree, he finally ‘seizes his freedom,’ resists the ‘temptation of hope’ that seeks to lull him back, and, facing death, instinctively chooses ‘rebellion’ over suicide. In return, he gains a life rich in sensation and an astonishingly exquisite taste for the present moment.

From Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus

“Nihilism is the consciousness of death and simultaneously its denial. It is the shoelace that appears at the very end of the last thought that crosses the condemned man’s mind (just a few meters ahead, at the very edge of that dizzying self-plunge), that absurd shoelace he cannot help but see. The opposite of the suicide is the condemned man.”

Upon its publication, The Stranger was hailed as a literary triumph of existentialism. The wave of existentialist works that swept the world around World War II was largely due to Camus’s The Stranger and Sartre’s series of philosophical theories. Though Camus was not an existentialist, he was indeed part of that movement.
Sartre described The Stranger as “a dry and clean work, seemingly disordered in appearance yet well-structured, and an exceedingly human work.”
The above commentary is a quotation solely from the section on The Stranger in Robert de Luppé’s ‘Albert Camus’. Luppé, a philosophy and literature professor who graduated from the Sorbonne, received the French Academy Prize for his thesis “Liberation Through Literature.” Specializing in modern philosophy and literature, he published this ‘Camus’ as his first major work.

Brief Introduction to The Fall

The Fall was published in 1955, when Camus was 41 years old, after he had retired from all political activities and returned to journalism.
This work is permeated with a melancholy of futility more profound than in any of his other works.
In a gloomy, damp hellish exile—a place of dark blue canals and flocks of pigeons soaring high—the protagonist, Clamence, relentlessly confesses how he came to fall.
One night, while crossing a bridge over the Seine, he witnessed a woman throwing herself into the water. He passed by without saving her. Since then, he has been tormented by an inexplicable laughter.
Yet this laughter became the catalyst for Clamence to reflect on his past self, ultimately realizing that his entire reputation and virtue had been nothing but a falsehood born of hypocrisy.
He then exposes the culpability of modern man—who, convinced of his own innocence, judges the sins of others—suggesting we are all similarly guilty.
Through this work, Camus paints a portrait of modern man trapped in absurdity and contradiction, emphasizing that this is precisely the image of us living today.
Moreover, the laughter echoing incessantly in Clamence’s mind might be the voice of conscience awakening his true self. It might be his own voice, one he cannot help but hear, even if he tries not to listen.