the stranger albert camus barnes and noble

The force of a high school teacher’s dismissal was still strong enough to convince a sixteen-year-old that she should be embarrassed to claim any understanding of The Stranger until she had picked up a copy of the book-although the internet was already letting her access the work in fragments. It was early in the days of the Instagram square Rowan Blanchard, Disney star, was not yet posting Audre Lorde quotes for her five million followers Tumblr, at four years old, had not yet toddled onto the computer screens of tweens everywhere.

The quote, as I had used it, was a collection of words that had more to do with me than Camus.

My teacher’s message reached me loud and clear: that one sentence, taken out of context, could not communicate anything significant about Camus’s ideas to me, and so indicating any tie between my ideas and his work could not be honest. Struggling to start a paper on the theme of identity in King Lear for my eleventh-grade English class, I googled “quotes on identity.” I included the sentence I found from Albert Camus’s The Stranger as an epigraph to my draft of the paper and blithely went to meet with my teacher about it it was only when he asked me if I had read Camus that I realized I had done something wrong, only when I saw his disdainful, frustrated response to my “no” that I started to feel mortified.

The stranger albert camus barnes and noble