SOURCE: "Meursault the Straw Man," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 92-100.

In the following essay, Brock provides an overview of critical interpretation of The Stranger. According to Brock, scholarly debate centered upon psychoanalytical speculation obscures the novel's primary significance as a treatise against capital punishment.

Although d'Ormesson was referring to the critic's approach to literature in general, it should be obvious to anyone reading learned articles on L'Etranger that he could have had their treatment of Camus' short masterpiece specifically in mind. This desire to explain, rather than to understand, means that the book will not be discussed as a whole, as an entity, but as a series of all but unrelated segments. There may well be some discussion of the story as a manifestation of the absurde, as well as arguments over just what that word entails, but the book will be examined...