Partial transcript
In his novel, The Stranger, Albert Camus address himself to the modern man hopelessly caught in his own prosaic life. He also gives us an existentialist's answer to this problem. His solution is a freedom that is contrary to the Lockean, Kantian, and Christian concepts. It is the freedom to let go and live the kind of life one wants, secure in the knowledge that there is no afterlife.
Camus leads us to this conclusion through the eyes of M. Meursault, an atheist whose ordinary life becomes one horrible entanglement. He commits a senseless murder, goes through an absurd trial, and finally finds himself facing decapitation "in a public place." After a violent confrontation with a traditional Catholic chaplain, Meursault is washed clean of all hope of escape from the execution or the non-existence that he believes will follow it. With imminent death in his future, he reasons that it really wouldn't have mattered what he had done in this world for eventually he would have died anyway. And when you have ceased to exist it doesn't matter whether you have lived the life of a saint or a murderer.
In this book, Camus seems to say that Christianity has given man false hope because it too often leaves man disillusioned when he meets with the reality of life and the absurdity of death. He tells us that the only way a man can be free is to give up all hope and accept life, unfair as it is.
Published unsigned by Rich Seeley in The Quaker Campus student newspaper, Whittier College, Whittier California, May 13, 1966
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