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Explanation and Analysis:
The Stranger is a work of fiction—more specifically, a work of philosophical or existentialist fiction. While many stories attempt to answer questions of philosophical importance, and all good stories shed light on some aspects of the human experience, The Stranger is particularly focused on the absurd: the conflict between a life of no intelligible meaning and a person who desires to understand life's meaning. The absurd, addressed in other works of both fiction and nonfiction by Camus, dominates Camus’s work as an author and The Stranger in particular. Although Camus himself denied the label of existentialist, and absurdism is not precisely an existentialist philosophy, the similarities between Camus and existentialists like Sartre and Kierkegaard leads scholars to group them together regardless.
The Stranger is narrated from a first-person point of view, written entirely from the perspective of the protagonist, Meursault. The Stranger, at just under 40,000 words, is a novella as opposed to a novel, although it is rich in content despite its shorter length. As a work of fiction published under Nazi-occupied France, it only made it through Nazi censorship due to an appearance of apoliticism, although some argue it is a political work. At the very least, as a piece of philosophical fiction it is engaged with by other scholars in both a philosophical and political manner. One example of such engagement is Sartre's "Commentary on the Stranger."
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