All throughout our discussions of existentialism I’ve also been reading The Stand by Stephen King. The premise for this particular novel is quite indicative of our world’s absurdity: a malfunction at a government research facility caused a deadly virus to be released, and resulted in most of the US population being wiped out. The real story, though, is in the groups of people who come together after the dust settles.

King’s skill in creating worlds and creating characters is unmatched. I feel as though just by reading three quarters of this book I’ve lived the lives of hundreds of people. In this reading, I have found that being detached, and accepting the absurdity of the world that King has created, has made the reading experience very powerful and fun. More fun, certainly, than if I had tried to justify or derive meaning from the absurdity of the world. Allowing myself to just exist in the world, was much more enlightening and gratifying.

A further connection to The Stranger I’ve found in The Stand is the utter prominence of physical and sexual desires. This becomes a more pervasive motif during Part 2 of The Stranger, but in King’s novel it is fairly constant. This focus on sex as an aspect of human nature, rather than love, I feel, is another part of existentialism that Camus touches on, but could be explored further. I would be interested to know whether King’s use of sexual and physical desires, rather than love stories, had any connection to his beliefs about existentialism.

We know Albert Camus’ book, L’Etranger, by its American translation, The Stranger, but when the book was published in the UK, it was published as The Outsider instead. The word “etranger” in French can be translated into both the outsider and the stranger as well as the foreigner, all of which fit Mersault’s position in the book to varying degrees and for different reasons.

Being a “stranger” is a good way to describe Mersault as not only is he a stranger to many of the most consequential characters in the book, but he is also a stranger to his friends. While he has friends and intimate relationships over the course of the novel, none of the people he is with ever truly understand his seemingly detached nature. Some, like Marie or Raymond accept it or choose to ignore it, but the majority of the people that Mersault meets over the course of the book consider him strange enough to be threatening or simply guilty. In addition, Mersault is a stranger to himself until the last pages of the book. He spends the rest of the story being apathetic and confused, simply reacting the world around him without truly making his own decisions until his confrontation with the priest pushes him toward understanding. In the last paragraphs of the book, he finds the meaning he has been searching for in life, but before that, he is a stranger to himself as well.

Mersault is also an “outsider” in the sense that he is outside of the emotions and constructs that rule the minds of the other characters in the story. From religion to marriage, Mersault does not seem to understand where others derive meaning in these things, to the point that he views them with derision. Not only is he an outsider who is misunderstood by the people around him, but he is where he wants to be. He believes that things like religion and marriage that characters like the priest and Marie care so much for are at best pointless and at worst actively hiding the prospect of a truly meaningful life from them.

While I think the titles are very similar and both very suited for the content of the book, The Outsider is my favorite because I think that it gives a better representation of Mersault’s role in his world and is also the title that he would pick if he could. He is proud of his place outside of the societal constructs that he deems worthless and detrimental and I think that he would rather be though of as a man who willingly pushed himself outside of those things than one who was simply a stranger.