r to the girl. Meursault is a complex- in some ways contradictory- character, and one of the most rewarding challenges of reading The Stranger is trying to figure out his personality. You'll have to sift through a lot of evidence as you try to get a grip on Meursault, and as you do you'll probably need to rethink some basic assumptions you have about people. CELESTE SETTINGThe city of Algiers, the principal setting of The Stranger, almost seems an active participant in the novel. The city is described as bathed in sunlight so intense at times that it makes Meursault feel dizzy; it is surrounded by white-hot beaches and endless expanses of sky and water. The street where Meursault lived was modeled after the Rue de Lyon- the main artery of Belcourt, the Algerian suburb where Camus grew up. Meursault's observations from his balcony (Part One, Chapter II) will give you a good sense of the atmosphere in Algiers during the late 193Os- the time when The Stranger was written, and the time that the action in the book, according to most critics, takes place. Algiers is a city of crowded apartment buildings, where the neighbors and shopkeepers all know one another. The streets are lined with bars and restaurants. Arabs, Europeans, and pieds-noirs- people of European descent born, as Camus himself was, in Algeria- live side by side, but not without tensions and conflicts. The story should be seen against this background of racial mix and unrest. Algiers is also a port city, where ships come and go constantly, leaving fragments of many cultures (the city has been described as a "marriage" of East and West) in their wakes. Camus has depicted the Algerians as a people with "a distaste for stability and a lack of regard for the future, people in a hurry to live." You can imagine the streets teeming with life, twenty-four hours a day. More than the city, even, the natural climate of North Africa forms a powerful backdrop to events and shifts of mood- t...
