The Purpose:Camus himself, on the back cover of the book says the book is an exploration of "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd"; at first glance this book seems to have an almost unhealthy lack of the absurd and Camus' statement seems meaningless. That is until the book as a whole is explored and one realizes that the lack of such is exactly what is absurd. The Stranger forces one to read …showed first 75 words of 591 total…

…showed last 75 words of 591 total…condemned to die for killing another man, however, the reader comes to understand that Mersault is actually condemned for the dangerous realization that life and death are, after all, meaningless. One could argue that many of the characters that Camus depicted in his works were actually fractions of himself, especially since Camus' inspiration for his work came from the North African landscape, "where the vast, silent sea meets the empty sand beneath a blazing sky."