Existentialism is a Humanism

Sartre begins his analysis by noting that although The Stranger was immediately acclaimed, it was also unique, “a stranger [...] from the other side of the horizon,” and hard to understand because of its “gratuitousness” and “ambiguity” (73).

Rather than trying to “prove anything” (73), Sartre says, the novel tells the story of a man, Mersault, who reacts to his mother’s death by going swimming, starting a futile affair, seeing a film, killing a man “because of the sun,” and then stating on the night before his execution that he is happy and hopes a large crowd will “welcome him with cries of hatred” at the scaffold (74).

Sartre describes Mersault as “an innocent” to whom moral categories do not apply, a man whose absurdity is “both a factual state and the lucid awareness that some people acquire from that state. The ‘absurd’ man is one who does not hesitate to draw inevitable conclusions from a fundamental absurdity” (74). Sartre defines this fundamental absurdity as the gap between the eternal, the drive toward unity, and the concern one feels for one’s projects, on the one hand, and the finitude of human existence, the division between mind and body, and the futility of all human efforts, on the other.