The opening sentence of The Stranger is one of the cleanest ethical traps in twentieth-century fiction. Two clauses. A fact and an uncertainty. Camus is doing, in nineteen words, what Kafka did in one paragraph and Flaubert in a chapter. He is telling us the kind of narrator we are about to spend the rest of the book inside.

Meursault is a thirty-year-old French-Algerian clerk at a shipping office in Algiers. His mother has been living for some years at a home for old people in Marengo, eighty kilometres inland; she had become too much for Meursault to care for in their small flat; the home has been, on the whole, fine; she has made a friend there, an old man named Thomas Pérez. The telegram arrives at Meursault's office. She is dead. Funeral tomorrow. Deep sympathy.

Meursault is not unaffected. He is, however, not affected in any of the nineteenth-century novel's standard ways. He does not weep. He does not pronounce anything. He asks his boss for two days off. The boss is visibly annoyed — it is inconvenient — and Meursault apologizes, which the narrator remarks he did not need to do, it was not his fault she had died. He takes the bus to Marengo. He sweats through the journey. He arrives at the home. He does not want to see the body in its coffin; the caretaker has opened it for him; Meursault says it is not necessary to open it. The caretaker nods. Meursault sits in the mortuary through the long vigil. He smokes. He drinks a small cup of coffee with milk that the caretaker offers him. He falls asleep briefly.

The funeral procession the next morning is punishing. The heat is extreme. It is the African summer. The ground of the road gleams. The hearse and the small group of mourners walk behind it. Old Pérez, old man Pérez, his mother's friend, walks too fast for his age and is not permitted to leave the procession to cut corners and keeps falling behind. Meursault's attention, throughout the chapter, is for physical details. The smell of the lilies. The creak of the hearse's leather. The sweat on Pérez's cheek that may or may not be a tear. The coolness of the church as they arrive.

He buries his mother. He takes the bus back to Algiers. He eats. He goes to bed. The next morning, a Saturday, he goes to the local beach. He runs into Marie Cardona, a young woman he used to know from the office. They swim. They see a comedy that evening. He sleeps with her.

This is the opening chapter. It is going to matter enormously at the trial, three hundred days later, that Meursault on the day after his mother's funeral went swimming with a girl and saw a comedy. It is not going to matter to Meursault. He does not understand that it will be used against him. He is not, Camus is showing us from the first page, a liar. He is a man who tells, of his own experience, the version that was true. He does not add feelings he did not have. He does not omit feelings he did. He is not a fool. He is not cold. He is something the novel of his period has no name for. He is a man who does not agree to pretend.

Marie Cardona used to work in the shipping office. She left some months back. Meursault encounters her on the tram to the beach on the morning after his mother's funeral. She is pretty in a clear, easy way; she wears a red-and-white striped dress; she is delighted to see him. They go to the beach together. They swim. They lie in the sun. They kiss in the water. He takes her to see a comedy at the local cinema. She sleeps at his flat.

A few weeks later, she asks him, with the ordinary half-ironic formality a young woman will use with a man she is beginning to love, whether he loves her. He answers her with one of the most famous lines in the French novel: the word means nothing in particular, but he does not think he does. She looks sad. He asks why. She says because it matters to her.

And so, several chapters later, when she asks him instead whether he would like to marry her, he answers the same way: it does not matter to him one way or the other, but if she wants to marry him, then yes, they can marry. He would answer the same, he tells her in all honesty, to any woman he had been sleeping with this long who asked.

Marie should, by the grammar of the nineteenth-century novel, be offended. She is not. She thinks about it. She looks at him. She concludes, in a small quiet judgment that is one of Camus's few tributes to what a gentle perceptive young woman can do with a Meursault, that he has not meant to hurt her, that he is the first man she has ever known to say exactly what he is thinking, and that she does, for this reason, want to marry him. They agree to marry when he has some money put by. They continue to see each other several evenings a week.

Camus is making, quietly, one of the book's central arguments. A society organizes itself around a vast quantity of small ceremonial lies — I love you; I will marry no one but you; I am devastated by my mother's death. The lies serve a social function. They allow the wedding to proceed, the funeral to proceed, the friendship to proceed. They also — Camus is arguing — train the people who use them to no longer know the difference between what they feel and what they say. Meursault, on his way to being the great criminal of his chapter, has one secret crime already: he does not tell these small ceremonial lies, and he does not, when asked directly, pretend to.

The court, at the trial, will find this much more disturbing than the murder. Marie will be called to the witness stand. She will be asked, by the prosecution, a series of questions about her relationship with the accused. She will be asked when she became his mistress. She will be asked whether the accused proposed marriage to her, or she to him. She will be asked what comedy they went to see the evening after his mother's funeral. And the court will receive her answers — which she will give honestly, because she is an honest young woman and does not understand that she is being used — as if they proved a moral character so depraved that the shooting of the Arab on the beach two months later was only the natural continuation. Meursault will sit in the dock and listen to his own love affair being turned into evidence that he is a man without a soul.

Raymond Sintès is Meursault's neighbour on the landing. He is a loud, small, muscular man of Meursault's own age. He is, the narrator tells us in a single accurate sentence, widely believed in the neighbourhood to live off women; he keeps a mistress whose family is Arab; the family does not approve of the arrangement; the mistress's brother has been circling. Raymond has been in a street fight with the brother recently. Raymond has a bandaged hand.

Raymond invites Meursault to dinner. He cooks blood sausage and opens wine. He tells Meursault the whole saga of his mistress. He believes she has been cheating on him. He has beaten her, once, in public. He now has a plan. He wants to write her a letter so wounding that she will come running back, and when she does, he will beat her again and throw her out. To make the letter properly, he needs someone whose handwriting is better than his. Meursault's is better than his. Would Meursault write the letter.

Meursault says: I do not mind. He uses the characteristic phrase of the novel. Cela m'est égal. It is all the same to me. He writes the letter. Raymond dictates it. The letter does what Raymond wants it to do. The next Sunday afternoon, the mistress is heard screaming in Raymond's flat. The neighbours call the police. The officer on the scene slaps Raymond when Raymond smokes in his presence. Raymond, before court, asks Meursault to testify to the court that the mistress had been cheating on him, which is Raymond's entire defence. Meursault agrees. It is, again, all the same to him.

Camus's structural care is enormous. Nothing Meursault is doing in this chapter is criminal by the standards of 1939 colonial Algiers. Everything Meursault is doing is — we realize only later — building, in small steps, the dossier of circumstantial association that will later, at the trial, allow the prosecution to construct him as a man of depraved habits. He wrote the letter. He defended Raymond to the police. He was a friend of a known pimp. He went with Raymond and Raymond's male friends to a beach, carrying Raymond's gun. These facts are, each, morally neutral. Their accumulation is not.

The deepest move Camus makes in this chapter is the deepest move he makes in the book. He shows us a man to whom consent costs nothing. Meursault agrees to everything because refusing would require him to construct a preference, and he does not. He agrees to write the letter. He agrees to marry Marie. He agrees to work in Paris for his boss's new branch office if asked. He agrees to dine with Raymond. He agrees to go to the beach on Sunday morning.

He is going to agree, a few chapters later, to fire a revolver five times into the chest of a stranger on a beach, for reasons he will never be able to articulate. The chain from the dinner of blood sausage to the shot on the beach is not causal in any ordinary sense. It is a chain of small consents. Camus is arguing, very quietly, that the chain was the crime. The shot was only the moment when the consent became, at last, legible to a prosecutor.

The Sunday. Raymond has invited Meursault and Marie to the beach house of a friend named Masson, an hour's bus ride west of Algiers. It is the hottest day of the year. The three men — Raymond, Masson, Meursault — walk along the beach in the morning. They come upon two Arabs. One of them is the brother of Raymond's mistress. There is a fight. Raymond is cut on the arm by the knife. Masson and Meursault help him back to the house. A doctor is called.

In the afternoon, Raymond — humiliated, furious — takes Masson's revolver and walks out again along the beach. Meursault, uneasy, follows him. They find the two Arabs at a small spring in the rocks. The Arabs are lying in the only patch of shade on the whole strip of beach. Raymond has the revolver drawn. He asks Meursault: do I shoot. Meursault says: do not shoot him unless he draws his knife. Raymond does not shoot. The Arabs retreat, slowly, into the rocks. The men go back to the house.

Meursault, alone, walks out again in the full afternoon sun to the same spring. He has Raymond's revolver in his pocket. He is looking — he thinks — for the shade, for a place to sit down out of the heat for a few minutes, for some peace. He is not, in his own internal narration, looking for the Arab. He thinks he will sit by the cool spring a few minutes and then walk back.

And at the spring the brother is there by himself. Lying in the shade. He is holding his knife. When he sees Meursault he sits up. Meursault, stepping forward in the sun, feels the heat as a weight. He feels the light of the knife blade in the sun hitting his eyes. He feels the sweat of his brow running down into his eyes. He feels, he tells us in the most famous paragraph of the novel, the sun on his forehead like an enormous physical hand. He is not thinking. He is barely conscious. He reaches his hand into his pocket and grasps the revolver and his finger tightens on the trigger. The revolver fires.

The Arab falls. Meursault stands over the body a moment. He is, for a small quiet interval, dizzied by what has happened. The Arab is very still. And then — and this is the sentence of the chapter and of the book — Meursault, for no reason he can ever afterward explain, raises the revolver and fires four more times into the already motionless body. Four more shots. Into a man who is already, from the first shot, not moving.

The chapter ends on that line. He tells us that he knew, in firing the four more times, that he was knocking on the door of misfortune. The first shot he can, perhaps, explain — the heat, the sun, the glare of the knife. The four more shots are indefensible, in any court and in his own reckoning.

Camus closes Part I of the novel here. Part II will be the trial, the prison, the priest, the last night. The rest of the book is an extended argument about what the four extra shots meant, and whether a society can convict a man for the shape of his interior life at the moment of them, and whether such a conviction is justice or something older and more ritual.

The trial is, procedurally, straightforward. Meursault has confessed. He shot an Arab on a beach. He fired five bullets at close range. The question before the jury is whether the sentence should be life imprisonment or death.

The prosecutor, a tall ambitious young man in a stiff collar, decides to go for death. To do so he does not need to prove the shooting — that is admitted. He needs to prove that Meursault is the kind of man for whom the shooting was the expression of a depraved character, not the misfortune of a single bad afternoon. And to do this he spends, across two full days of testimony, not on the shooting but on the weeks before and after it.

He calls the director of the old-people's home at Marengo. The director testifies that Meursault did not want to see his mother's body in the coffin. That he smoked during the vigil. That he drank a cup of coffee with milk. That he did not cry. That he did not ask the age of his mother at her funeral. The jury writes this down.

He calls the caretaker of the home. The caretaker testifies, with small corrections, to the same facts. He calls old Pérez, the mother's friend, who confesses on the stand that, being unwell that day, he did not see whether Meursault cried. The prosecutor suggests that perhaps no one saw Meursault cry because Meursault did not cry. Meursault, on the stand, when asked directly, confirms: no, he did not cry at his mother's funeral.

He calls Raymond. He calls Masson. He calls Marie. He establishes that the day after his mother's funeral Meursault began a sexual relationship with a woman and took her to a comedy film. He establishes that Meursault wrote a letter on behalf of a neighbour of dubious character. He establishes that Meursault carried a revolver on the morning of the shooting. He establishes that no tears have been observed, by any witness, on Meursault's face from that day to this.

And in his closing speech, in a manoeuvre that has become a famous study in the rhetoric of colonial-era French criminal law, the prosecutor looks at the jury and argues that the man on trial is not merely a murderer. He is a man who buried his mother with the heart of a criminal. He is a man whose emotional vacancy at his mother's grave is of a piece with the emotional vacancy with which he shot an Arab on a beach. The two are the same crime. The jury, the prosecutor argues, must not be distracted into considering only the technical question of whether the shooting was manslaughter. They must consider whether a man who does not weep at his mother's funeral is not already, in some essential sense, a murderer. If he is, they must send him to the guillotine.

The jury, after brief deliberation, returns a verdict of death.

Camus is showing us, with the cold clarity that was his signature, the structural argument of the book. The court is not judging the act on the beach. The court is judging Meursault's interior life — and finding it, not criminal exactly, but unforgivable in a way that criminality is only its surface expression. The court is executing Meursault for being the kind of person he is. The shooting is a convenient pretext.

The chaplain has come four times. Meursault has refused to see him four times. He does not want to see him. He does not believe in God. He does not wish to have his last days of life spent in conversations about a God he does not believe in.

On the fifth visit — the night before the execution — the chaplain does not wait for permission. He comes into the cell. He sits down at the foot of the bunk. He is a small, mild, serious man. He asks Meursault why he refuses to see him. Meursault says, with his usual honesty, because I have nothing to say to you.

The chaplain is undaunted. The chaplain begins the sermon he has prepared. The chaplain tells Meursault that God is love. The chaplain tells Meursault that every man has the capacity to see the face of Christ in the stones of his cell wall if he looks with faith. The chaplain tells Meursault that his refusal is a refusal of a life eternal that will be granted him if he will only ask. The chaplain tells Meursault that he will pray for him in his final morning.

And Meursault, for the first time in the book, becomes angry. Camus gives the reader one page — the penultimate page of the novel — of Meursault's fury. He gets up. He seizes the chaplain by the collar of his cassock. He swears at him. He tells him he does not want his prayers. He tells him that none of his faith is worth a single strand of a woman's hair. He tells him that he, Meursault, has been sure all along of the one thing the chaplain is unsure of, which is that he is going to die, and that this certainty is worth more than all the chaplain's certainty about the next world. He tells him: I have been right. I am still right. I have always been right. I have lived in such and such a way. I have not lived in another way. I did this and not that. And so what.

The guards come in. They pull him off the chaplain. The chaplain goes. Meursault is left alone in the cell. The rage passes off. He lies back on the bunk.

And then Camus gives us the last paragraph of the novel — one of the most quoted paragraphs in twentieth-century fiction. Meursault, in the night in the cell, alone, for the first time in his life, opens himself to what he calls the tender indifference of the world. He feels, from the stars coming in through the bars of the window, a kinship he has not previously noticed. He understands that the world is not hostile to him, and not friendly to him, and not indifferent to him in the cold sense. It is indifferent in a tender sense. It does not care what he does. It holds him the way it holds every grain of sand on the beach on which he shot a man. And this thought, at the end of the book, is the one Meursault has been looking for without knowing it was what he was looking for.

The book ends on the bunk in the cell, in the last hour of the night. Meursault is awake. He has understood something about the indifference of the world. He is, for the first time in the novel, almost happy. He has made peace with his own life in a way his trial did not think was available to him. He has also made peace, implicitly, with the shooting — not by excusing it, but by accepting that the life he lived contained it, and that he cannot at this late hour pretend it did not.

And then, in the last sentence of the book, he surprises himself with a small final wish. He wishes, he tells us, so that he will feel less alone, that there will be many spectators on the morning of his execution, and that they will greet him with cries of hatred.

This is the sentence for which The Stranger has been read and reread. Every generation produces a new reading of it. The simplest reading is the one Camus himself gave in his later preface: Meursault has accepted, at last, that he is a man in a community. He has accepted that his community does not understand him and will not understand him. He has accepted that its hostility is its form of attention. He prefers — in the last night of his life — hostile attention to no attention at all. He wishes to be executed publicly, in front of a crowd that will scream at him, because this is the only form of company his death can take.

The deeper reading is the one most critics since have argued over. Meursault — who for 120 pages has agreed to everything because nothing mattered — in the final sentence wishes for something. He prefers one outcome to another. He has come, over the course of the book, to the beginning of wanting. A man who wants is not, in Camus's terms, a man of the absurd in the pure sense. He is a man re-entering the world of preference, of desire, of human company. Meursault at the moment of his execution is — perhaps for the first time in his life — fully alive.

The book closes on that sentence. The execution never happens on the page. Camus does not give us the morning. He gives us the wish for the morning. A wish for a crowd of strangers who will hate him. He gives us, in that final wish, the shape of a man coming back into the human fold at the exact moment he is about to be put out of it.

This is the argument Camus spent the rest of his life elaborating — in The Myth of Sisyphus, in The Plague, in The Rebel, in the Nobel speech. The absurd man is not a man who gives up on the world. The absurd man is a man who, knowing there is no cosmic meaning to his suffering, decides in the last hour to live it anyway, and to prefer his own life, and to wish to be surrounded — even by a crowd baying for his death — rather than to be alone. Meursault, on his bunk, becomes on the last page the first and clearest figure of what Camus will call, across the rest of his work, the revolted man. He has consented to everything for a year. He ends by consenting, at last, to himself.