Abstract

Camus’ most well-known work, "L’etranger," has been subjected to extensive literary analysis. Most commentators and critics have focused their attention on Meursault, Camus’ protagonist, and addressed the alienated nature of his character. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that Meursault is not merely an anti-hero but the fictional embodiment of a thoroughly hollow modern man. Less attention has been paid to the literary techniques that Camus employed to depict Meursault’s story. In particular, little attention has been directed toward the sequence of alliterative images that track Meursault’s existential journey from detached everyman to condemned murderer in the Ward translation to English. A careful reading of the text shows that Camus uses images of sand, sun, sea, and sky to signify important phases in Meursault’s passive drift away from existential choice and toward his final acquiescence and surrender to the vicissitudes of what Camus has created to first appear as an irrational and absurd universe. In the end it is apparent that it is Meursault’s absurd choices—and not the earthly reality of sand, sun, sea, and sky—that makes his life absurd.