This book is the most convincing argument of existentialism that I have ever encountered.

Meursault comes across to me as impressively brave against the oppression of emotion, religion, belonging, justice. Most importantly, he seems liberated from doubt. In merely being a stranger to the world that he lives in, he doesn’t have a “my way of being,” nor a “justification for existence.” As he says best, “all the time, I’d been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow’s or another day’s, which was to justify me.”

From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. (110)