Albert Camus Isolationism

Albert Camus “The Stranger” by Albert Camus is an iconic piece of existentialist literature. Throughout the narrative, which concerns the incident of the murder of an Arab native in French Algiers, the themes of absurdism, religion, and isolationism are explored. Camus took from his own experience his disillusion with organized religion, the resulting development of his absurdist view of the meaning of existence and the recurring physical and philosophical isolationism he experienced in his own life, to relate the story of murder and injustice. As the central character Mersault struggles with his own indifference to events surrounding him and the nature of existence, Camus’ ideas on these recurring themes become clear. By examining Camus’ own

Webster’s defines “absurd” as “extremely silly, foolish or unreasonable, having no rational orderly relationship to life, meaningless”. The origin of the word is from the Latin absurdus, meaning out of tune, irrational. As it pertains to philosophy, absurdism is based on the belief that the universe is irrational and meaningless, and that the search for order brings the individual into conflict with the universe. There were aspects of Camus’ life that contributed to the development of his philosophical viewpoint. A native of the French colony in Tangiers, Camus was brought up in an environment of disassociation. The contentious relationship with France as an annexed French territory, where the repression of the native population contributed to struggle for independence, can be seen as an early example of Camus’ distrust of the absurd nature of government. Camus’s father was killed early in World War I when Camus was a year old, and he and his brother were raised by their mother, was illiterate and deaf. She worked as a house cleaner, and the poverty he was born combined with his development into the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature has an absurdist aspect to