Albert Camus’s The Stranger is most nearly the anti-christ, to the scholarly, perfunctory perspective of how modern literary study has come to assimilate us. In the broad scope of literature, Laurence Perrine claims that the theme of a work is its “controlling idea or its central insight… [and] unifying generalization about life”. Camus's novel is a radical agent because it suggests that a narrative does not need theme to establish meaning, and then suggest that you can then find meaning in that very absence. But we must ask ourselves if the power of the central message then can lie within its lack-there-of? To grasp this, It first must be conceded that to there say there is no theme to the book is wrong. However, to give substance to any single derived meaning from The Stranger is to miss the central message entirely.
The importance of The Stranger lies in its inconsistencies; it lies in its invariable and very intentional struggle to state a general constant about the condition of being alive because it claims that such a constant does not and cannot possibly exist. To try and take solace in any of the individual themes or ideas that Camus portrays, is to fall victim to the very demonic constructs that relentlessly antagonize Meursault throughout the novel. To fall victim to these demons is to accept that there is reason or definition to the chaotic world at hand; this chaos, if anything, the one unifying body that Camus revisits throughout. Like Camus reasoned in his evaluation of Sisyphus, in order to be truly enlightened by the work, we as the reader must also settle, upon rolling the boulder to the top of our condemned hill, with looking on the stone with purpose as it rolls slowly back to where it had started, being satisfied not knowing anything more about the human condition at the novel’s conclusion, then we did at the start. That frustration, that fleeting futility, is the true ¨theme¨ that Camus strives to convey through Meursault´s experiences.
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