Stranger Journal 3

The Title "The Stranger" carries multiple connotations but there are a few that are very apparent to me.


One connotation of the word stranger is someone that you don't know, or are not familiar with.  This connects to the story because Meursault is a very confusing person and it is hard to know what he is thinking.  We don't know much more about him than what we can piece together by the ways he talks and the things he says in the book.  He is very different from the other characters in the book, in an emotional and spiritual sense.  To the reader, he seems stranger than the other characters.


Another connotation for the word stranger is someone who is not from a certain place, or in this case, a foreigner.  The title of the book in French is L'Étranger, or The Foreigner.  Meursault is a French man living in Algeria (a pied noir).  He is not of Algerian origin and, by definition, he is a foreigner to the country.  However the book suggests he has been living in Algeria his whole life, because of the way his mother lived there, and the opinion he has on living in another country (when his boss offered him a job in Paris).  He did not like the thought of going somewhere new to a place he was not familiar with.  This may mean that he is a foreigner in a metaphorical sense of the word.  Meursault is a foreigner to the people around him, connecting with the former connotation.