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Camus's Stranger Retried

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

René Girard*
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 18, Md.

Extract

I have always pictured Meursault as a stranger to the sentiments of other men. Love and hatred, ambition and envy, greed and jealousy are equally foreign to him. He attends the funeral of his mother as impassively as he watches, on the following day, a Fernandel movie. Eventually, Meursault kills a man, but how could I feel that he is a real criminal? How could this man have any motive for murder?

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 1964 , pp. 519 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1907

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References

1 Of La Chute, Jacques Madaule writes: “En un certain sens, c'est comme une réplique et une réponse à L'Etranger.” In “Camus and Dostoïevski,” La Table ronde, cxxvi (1960), 132. See also the article of Quilliot in Camus, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962).

2 Louis Hudon, “The Stranger and the Critics,” Yale French Studies, xxv, 61.