Incestuous Longings in Camus' The Stranger

Abstract

Camus’s iconic novel has been taught to generations of readers as the story of a tragic hero, Meursault, who shuns hypocrisy and social conformity. A psychoanalytic reading of the novel yields a different picture: Meursault’s behavior and emotional estrangement seem to indicate an inability to separate internally from his mother and relinquish early incestuous longings for her. The focus in this paper on early infantile erotism in the context of Freudian theory reveals a troubled protagonist alienated from himself and from others in his relentless flight from the impossibility of his desires.