Ever since Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, there has been a trend of protagonists, usually isolated men, who've become sad, melancholic, frustrated, and/or insane from their internal mental struggles to either attain meaning in their lives or to break it down even further. Among these men are the Underground Man, Raskolnikov, Nietzsche himself, Pablo Ibbieta, and Gyorgy Korin just to name a few. Although they are unique in their own rights - especially Korin - they all share a thought process that alienates them from the world.
Meursault, though estranged from us, is not like the other characters in this trend from existentialism because he does not reflect on hierarchical knowledge, order, and existence; he neither questions nor does he accept these to begin with. We can assume that Meursault was not institutionalized since childhood in an everyday sense. In other words, because Meursault has not taken morality and rationality into consideration, he does not suffer from discarding values that other characters hold dearly.
That way, it's not as easy to empathize with Meursault as it is with other people, let alone existential characters, because we have no idea what it simply feels like to see formations of matter (physical objects) and actions without subconsciously attaching meaning to them. So The Stranger is a more difficult story than its voice suggests. Whenever we try to renounce hierarchical knowledge, or Apollonian ethics, it's almost always the case that we lose nothing because we have nothing at replace it all with at the moment. For Meursault, it's as easy as shutting one's eyes...
What really interests me about your analysis is the comparison you draw between the "Underground Man" and Meursault himself. I definitely agree with the clear distinction that you make that notes the idea of rejecting commonly accepted morality that Meursault does not have to deal with. In many ways this allows Meursault to move beyond facticity and to a world of consciousness, which is something that the characters such as the underground man seem to struggle with.
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