The Stranger: International Edition recap

Meursault, a French Algerian clerk, returns from his mother's funeral and resumes his ordinary life with striking emotional detachment. He begins a relationship with Marie and drifts into the affairs of his neighbor Raymond, whose abuse of a former mistress provokes a conflict with her brother. During a visit to a beach, heat, glare, chance, and Raymond's revolver converge as Meursault shoots the brother, then fires four more times. In prison and at trial, the authorities focus as much on his failure to mourn conventionally as on the killing. The prosecutor turns his conduct at the funeral into evidence of a morally empty nature, and Meursault is convicted and sentenced to death. After rejecting a chaplain's demand for faith, he accepts that death comes to everyone and that the universe supplies no special meaning. This recognition frees him from hope and leaves him calm as he awaits execution.

Meursault learns that his mother has died at a care home in Marengo. He obtains leave from his employer, travels to the home, and sits through an overnight vigil without asking to see the body. He notices the room, the residents, his tiredness, and the coffee and cigarette he accepts more readily than he expresses grief. The next day he follows the coffin through oppressive heat while his mother's elderly companion Thomas Perez struggles behind the procession. Back in Algiers on the following day, Meursault swims with Marie Cardona, a former coworker. They go to a comedy and spend the night together. On Sunday he remains alone on his balcony, watching the street until the weekend ends. His life appears to have resumed with little outward change, though his conduct already sits uneasily beside what others expect from a bereaved son.

Meursault befriends Raymond Sintes, a neighbor who claims that a mistress has deceived him. Without taking a moral position, Meursault writes a letter intended to bring the woman back so Raymond can humiliate her. When she visits, Raymond beats her and a policeman intervenes; Meursault later agrees to support Raymond's account. Marie asks whether Meursault loves her. He says the question has little meaning to him, though he is willing to continue their relationship. In the same building, the elderly Salamano loses the dog he habitually insults and strikes, then reveals how distressed and lonely the disappearance has left him. These neighbors confide in Meursault because he listens without judgment. His passivity, however, has drawn him into Raymond's campaign against his former mistress and the conflict surrounding her family.

Meursault declines an opportunity to work in Paris because one life seems much like another to him. When Marie raises marriage, he is willing if she wants it but does not claim that he loves her. Raymond invites them to Masson's beach house. Two men connected to Raymond's former mistress follow the group, and a fight leaves Raymond cut by a knife. After a doctor treats him, Raymond returns to the beach carrying a revolver. Meursault persuades him not to shoot and takes the weapon. Later, walking alone in intense heat, Meursault encounters one of the men again near a spring. The man's knife flashes in the sunlight. Overwhelmed by heat and glare, Meursault fires Raymond's gun once, killing him, pauses, and then fires four additional shots into the body.

In custody, Meursault at first treats legal representation as a formality. His appointed lawyer is alarmed that investigators have gathered testimony about the funeral and asks whether Meursault suppressed natural grief. Meursault cannot give the reassuring answer the lawyer wants. The examining magistrate questions him about the pause between the first shot and the next four, then urges him to accept God; Meursault says he does not believe. Months pass in prison. Marie visits once, but the rules later bar her because they are not married. Meursault gradually adapts to confinement by sleeping, remembering the objects in his former room, and replaying an old newspaper story. He learns that a person can become used to almost any circumstances. After eleven months, his case comes to trial amid summer heat and a crowd of spectators.

At trial, Meursault feels as though the lawyers and witnesses are discussing him while excluding him from his own case. The director and caretaker of the home describe his behavior at the vigil; Thomas Perez cannot decisively say whether he cried; Marie must recount that their first outing, a comedy, occurred the day after the funeral. Celeste tries to defend him as a friend, while Raymond's evidence exposes the chain of events that led to the beach. The prosecutor uses these facts to portray the killing as deliberate and Meursault as a man without a conscience. The defense argues the shooting itself but cannot overcome the moral drama built around the funeral. Meursault recognizes that the court is judging him for not displaying expected feelings as much as for causing a death.

Meursault is found guilty and sentenced to death by guillotine. Back in his cell, he fixates on the certainty of the execution, the slim chance of an appeal, and the fact that every life ends regardless of its length. He repeatedly refuses to see the chaplain. When the chaplain comes anyway and presses him toward God, Meursault explodes in anger, rejecting promises of another life and insisting on the certainty of his present experience and approaching death. After the guards remove the chaplain, the outburst gives way to calm. Meursault thinks of his mother and understands her late attachment to Thomas Perez as a renewed readiness to live. Accepting that the universe is indifferent and that no one escapes death, he feels freed from false hope. He awaits execution reconciled to the world and wishes only that a hostile crowd be present to receive him.

The court convicts Meursault of murder and sentences him to death by guillotine. His appeals fail, and he waits in his cell while imagining the machinery of execution and the remote possibility of a pardon. When the chaplain urges him to turn to God, Meursault finally erupts, rejecting religious consolation and the demand that life possess a higher design. The outburst leaves him calm. He recognizes that death is the common fate of everyone and accepts a universe that offers no personal judgment or guaranteed meaning. Thinking of his mother beginning a new companionship near the end of her life, he feels that she too had opened herself to living without false hope. Meursault ends the night at peace with existence as it is. He wishes for a large, hostile crowd at his execution, a final acknowledgment that he and the world meet without comforting illusions.