The Stranger’s murder happens under the sun’s blinding influence, not calculation

Evidence

Camus went on to spend much of his life in France, but he always felt an outsider there, lost without the brilliant-white Mediterranean sun that had been the one compensation in his early life. The sun became almost a character in his fiction, especially in his first novel, The Stranger. This tells of a French-Algerian called Meursault (his first name is never given), who gets into a confrontation on a beach with a knife-wielding ‘Arab’ — whose name is never given at all. Meursault, who happens to have a friend’s gun, shoots the man almost absent-mindedly while dazzled by the light glancing off the sea and the knife blade. Arrested and put on trial, he confusedly tells the judge that he did it because of the sun. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 481

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how the absurdist motif of indifferent nature (the sun) operates as a character-level force in Camus’s fiction.
• SEED: A comparison could be written between Camus’s sun-as-murder-instigator and the role of landscape in other existentialist fiction (Sartre’s chestnut tree, Heidegger’s clearing).