The Stranger

"The Stranger"

By Rubiel O.

Albert Camus created a story about a man named Meursault. In this story, he faces his mother's funeral, love, and disaster. Death is a really big event in this story. Meursault narrated the story, telling the reader what happened in chronological order. The first part is what happened before he created problems for himself, and the second part is the aftermath of what he did.

The Stranger was one of my favorite books I've read in my high school career. The story was set with the main character speaking to the reader. I've never read a book like that, and that was very interesting. The beginning of the story was great, I understood what was going on with the funeral, the lady Meursault had met and the relationship they had, also what he did to get himself into trouble with the law and go to court. I just don't think that Salamano was important to the plot. Without him or his dog, nothing would have really changed drastically. Maybe having Salamano provide the weapon for Meursault and getting in trouble for providing it would have worked out. There wasn't anything else that was bad with the plot itself.

One thing I struggled with while reading, was figuring out when someone was speaking. How the whole story was Meursault explaining what had happened, the single quotation marks threw me off a lot. I have been so exposed to the regular double quotation marks and it made me think a lot more in the structures of the sentences. Also it was hard to comprehend the whole second part. I know how court works a little bit, but so much was going on, and different characters jumping in with something to say, especially the lawyers. With the quotation marks already creating difficulty, multiple characters speaking at once and others quoting what another character said, I just had more trouble reading and understanding the story.  

I've never read any of Albert Camus' books, but I enjoyed this story. It wasn't my taste, but the plot and the characters had me wanting to read more. Even after the book has ended, I wanted to know what would happen to all the other characters from this story line. Pick this book up and start reading it. It's a great investment of your time.