The Landscape as Voice in Albert Camus's The Outsider

Abstract

Albert Camus‘s The Outsider is both a founding existentialist manifesto and a work of fiction set in mid-century colonial Algeria. The temptation is to read the novel as one or the other; the challenge is to read it as both. In “The Landscape as Voice in Albert Camus‘s The Outsider,” Grace Szucs admirably takes up this challenge and argues persuasively that the most powerful presence in the novel—the blazing Algerian sun—is not just a force of nature but of culture, and more specifically, of anti-colonialism. The sun drives Meursault to murder the nameless Arab man on the beach, which leads to Meursault‘s execution, but also to the war of independence that eventually drives the French out of Algeria.

Dr. Alice Brittan