Pham 1

Annotated Bibliography for Albert Camus’ The Stranger

Armstrong, Karen. “Let's revive the Golden Rule.” TED. Sep. 2009. 16 Dec. 2010.

Summary:

Karen Armstrong talks about treating others the way humans would like to be treated.
She goes into details and examples of the golden rule, and the importance of it.

Purpose:
I chose this talk because Mearsault gets treats others the way he was treated because
when he lost his mom he didn’t really care. When it came to Marie he didn’t really care.
He treated everyone equal, EQUAL and nothing less.

Badiou, Alain. "Existence and death." Discourse (Detroit, MI). (Vol. 24). .1 (Winter 2002): p63.
Literature Resource Center. Gale. Malden High School. 8 Dec. 2010

Summary:
This article is a very philosophical it explains freedom, existence and nothingness. It goes
into the fact that freedom is a part of life and death also. It also talks about God, and the
history of Existentialism.

Important Quotes:
Existence, in a Sartrean or Cartesian sense, and moreover in a Lacanian, as well as in a
Hegelian sense, distinguishes itself from being to the exact degree that it is nothingness.
To exist is to be free, and therefore indeterminate with regard to being, prey to the work
of nothingness. Existence gnaws at being or makes a hole in the real. The only being of
existence is the lack-of-being (manque-a-etre) (Par. 3).

Purpose:
Meursualt experiences this idea that people are living knowing that they will have to die
eventually. This idea of Existentialism is when he had to go to jail, which took away his
freedom. This relates to the book because Meursualt was very emotionless and really
didn’t care about others, including himself. When he was at court, “the presiding judge
asked himself] anything to say. I thought about it. I said, ‘No.’” (Camus 107). He didn’t
stand up for himself because he knew that he wasn’t going to get away with it anyways.

"Albert Camus." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource Center.
Gale. Malden High School. 8 Dec. 2010

Summary:
This essay shows that Camus died at a really young age, 47. He got married twice and
has three kids. This shows that life can end at any moment, and we would just have to
deal with it.
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Important Quotes:
Born November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria; died after an automobile accident,
January 4, 1960, near Paris, France; son of Lucien (a farm laborer) and Catherine (a
charwoman; maiden name, Sintes) Camus; married Simone Hie, 1933 (divorced);
married Francine Faure, 1940; children: (second marriage) Jean (son) and Catherine
(twins).(Par. 2)

Purpose:
When Meursualt took away the Arab’s life, he didn’t think about the fact that he has a
family or someone loves him. When humans are in this kind of situation, they don’t
really think about who loves them or why God decided to take away a life. Everyone has
a purpose on Earth even if it’s picking up a piece of trash.

"Decolonization." Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. Ed.
John Merriman and Jay Winter. Vol. 2. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006. 790-803.
Gale World History In Context. Web. 8 Dec. 2010.
Summary:
This article talks about Europe taking control of non-European territories. The non-
European territories had no say or independence. This really made the non-European
alienated from the whole.

Important Quotes:
Since then, however, decolonization has subsumed other descriptions of what happened
to European overseas empires after 1945, some widely used, such as the aforementioned
"national liberation" and the "transfer of power," or the "end of empires," as well as
designations that appear mainly in archived documents, like the British Colonial Office's
use of "constitutional advances," or the India Office's evocations in the 1930s of
"diarchy" and in 1945–1947 of "demission." (Par. 6)

Purpose:
This related to the book because Albert Camus was really bothered about the fact that
Algeria was controlled by France. They had no independence and no freedom. Camus
hints that Algeria was captive when he went to jail.

Derksen, Celeste. "A Feminist Absurd: Margaret Hollingsworth's The House That Jack Built."
Modern Drama. 45.2 (Summer 2002): 209-230. Rpt. in Drama Criticism. Ed. Thomas J.
Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 28. Detroit: Gale, Literature Resource Center.
Gale. Malden High School. 8 Dec. 2010

Summary:
This Essay about Absurdity talks about things being out of order not the usual. It’s when
an author talks about one thing and does another, ironic. The same exact word for
absurdity is weird.
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Important Quotes:
[...] So I built her a house. I mean, what more can a man do for his wife? You meet a girl.
It's too soon. High school, but what can you do when she's the right one. Chew on your
nails? Jerk yourself off? No. You buy her a ring, right? You buy her a ring, and then you
marry her. You do it right. You work for her, and you just have to hope she doesn't get
herself pregnant before you've got her a house. That's the way it is. I mean you tell me
different, don't matter who you are. There's no other way when you come right down to
it. (Par. 4)

Purpose:
The purpose of this essay is that Meursault was a quiet guy. Humans may even consider
him as being innocent and weird. When he didn’t memorize his mothers birthday or even
know her age, that’s absurdity.

Kitson, Simon. "Spying for Germany in Vichy France: Simon Kitson explores the prevalence of
spying for and against the Nazis in southern France after the German invasion." History Today
56.1 (2006): 38+. Gale World History In Context. Web. 8 Dec. 2010.

Summary:
This article is about spying on each other’s country. They wanted information and to be
alliances to out battle the others. They wanted full control and to be the most powerful
country.

Important Quotes:
The internal rivalries of the Nazi state offer one explanation for this situation. It is well
known that Hitler's regime encouraged a form of 'divide and rule', which promoted
rivalry between organisms born of the Nazi party and the institutions of pre-existing
structures such as the army. In the case of espionage this translated into a struggle
between the Nazi-inspired Sicherheitsdienst (Sipo-SD), or Security Police, and the
military intelligence structure known as the Abwehr. Within Germany these battles had
already largely been won by the Nazi formations. But the newly occupied territories, such
as France, allowed the conflict to begin afresh. Both the Abwehr and Sipo-SD poured
resources into France, partly in the hope of outdoing each other in the quest for
information. (Par. 4)

Purpose:
Germany took over France and France took over Algeria, this shows that there is a
pyramid of powerful leaders. They have to follow the rules or they will be executed.
They had no choice but to take control so that they wouldn’t be back stabbed.

"REBELLIOUS PATRIOT." Time 26 May 1958: 28. Gale World History In Context. Web. 8
Dec. 2010.

Summary:
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France and the Nazi in WW11 was competing with one other to show who’s more
powerful. The French gave up and the Nazi had full control. Algeria had hero that was
willing to sacrifice their life to protect the Algerians.

Important Quotes:
World War II. On the day France surrendered to the Nazis in 1940, Jacques Massu, still a
lieutenant commanding a fort in the Sahara scribbled a "rude French word'' in his diary
and beneath it the pledge: "Nous vainerons" (We shall win). Hearing De Gaulle's radio
appeal from London, Massu joined the Free French in Africa, was nicked in the calf by
an Italian bullet in a desert battle, calmly cauterized the wound himself with a cigarette,
fought on across North Africa and into France and Germany as a lieutenant colonel with
General Le-clerc's famed 2nd Armored Division.

Purpose:
The purpose is that Camus felt like he had no freedom. He was like Algeria and he had to
choose if he was going to rebel against France or not. Algeria was under the control of
France at the time the book was written.

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” Poetry Out
Loud. 10 Dec. 2010.

Summary:
The poem shows that the Summer days are very hot and unbearable. He doesn’t want
Summer to end because the days are shorter.

Important Quotes:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Purpose:
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The Stranger was based in the summer because he would go down to the chanel to swim
with Marie. When he was at the summer home with Raymond, the sun would constantly
be in his eyes. The sun was a foreshadowed because when he killed the Arab the sun was
slicing his face. The light or sun would always bother him and it would really bother him
because it was so bright.