
Another Country
Midway through Camus's absurdist classic The Stranger, the pied-noir protagonist, Meursault, famously shoots an unnamed Arab on a French-Algerian beach for no better reason than that the sun is in his eyes. His subsequent trial and conviction revolve around many things, mostly his cavalier behavior on the day of his mother's funeral, but one thing that barely if ever comes up is the inherent and inviolable humanity of the man he has killed. They may have lived (at least superficially) in the same society, and swum in the same warm waters, but Meursault was fundamentally a citizen of the French