Writer and teacher James Sallis discusses the reading and re-reading of Albert Camus's The Stranger, one of the novels on my most re-read list:
It really is true that Camus's is a different novel each time I read it. I've little doubt that it was the novel's essential rebelliousness to which, reading it as a teenager, I first responded, and now I ask my students: Do you see a parallel between the manner in which Meursault holds emotion at bay, never seems able to do what is expected of him, and fails again and again to fit in, and the behavior of alienated adolescents as they begin to form themselves as personalities, to give a good imitation of being human?
Yes, we talk about the novel's philosophical background. I sketch existentialism's history, its literature, the disaccord between Sartre and Camus. But literature, I warn them (contrast Sartre and Camus here), is about people, not ideas, and the novel at hand is just that, a novel, an attempt to let us inside one man's head, and by no means a primer in existentialism. Flannery O'Connor once remarked that theme and meaning in a story are folded deeply into the heart of the thing, that they're not like the string on a sack of feed, where you just have to pick it out, then you can rip the story open and feed the chickens.
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