"The Stranger" by Camus

Somehow I missed reading this classic.  On a ship without wifi for 12 days, I picked it up.  A short tale, I read it in a matter of hours.  And then thought about it far longer.  The story is told from the point of view of Meursault, a Frenchman living in Algiers.  His mother has died.  We drift from the funeral, to his meeting a woman, to his vacation on a beach.  Events occur and Meursault ends up on trial for murder.  In the telling, Meursault is impassionate and factual.  He relates the events as if he is not a participant, and the only emotion he ever seems to express is a slight annoyance at human proclivities.  In modern standards he might be seen as a sociopath, a psychopath, a narcissist, or someone who fits any number of other diagnosis from the DSM V.  But this wasn't written recently.  It was written by Camus at the end of WWII.  Many of the literary works which came out at the time had a dehumanizing element (people waking up as cockroaches, for one).  I have to think, given the horrors of the German occupation of France, those who survived it had to find a way to explain true evil.  They came up with characters who weren't fully human.  Meursault's ability to divide his self from his acts is one way to look at the actions of the Germans.  They desensitized themselves to the genocide they perpetrated.  They walked through the world without making connections to other people.  They set themselves apart.  Perhaps.  Who knows what Camus' real intent was?  I'm sure there are a thousand college professors with a thousand different takes on this story.  One final note.  The original French title was "The Outsider" -- which is far more accurate than "The Stranger", in my humble opinion.  The title was changed so as not to be confused with S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders" novel.  But the original title seems more on point.  Meursault was a stranger to himself, but he was an outsider to society.