Meursault, the novel's hero, a "stranger" to the system of Christian morality insofar as he cannot comprehend it, is certainly not an "outsider", neither consciously choosing to remain "outside" society nor being rejected by it. On the contrary, Meursault is the perfect model of a young lower-middle-class Algerian- born, with an ordinary desk job, and with the ordinary insider's simple taste for watching a banal film, having a drink at the local bar, going to the beach, lying in the sun. He is very much inside the French Algerian colonial scene, living the most ordinary of lives, not at all a social reject and in no way a rebel.
Meursault is on the road to becoming the Absurd Hero, one who will accept the non-sense of the world which has condemned him not passively, but as a full participant in the brief time left to him. While waiting for his appeal, Meursault begins an "absurd reasoning" and starts to consider his death. He knows there is not so much difference between dying at thirty or seventy. It's still death and there's nothing afterwards, therefore, he has to --logically--reject his own appeal. At the same time, there is a typical Camusian clinging to life: "At this point my chain of thought was shaken by the terrible leap I felt in me at the idea of having twenty more years to live.".
The calm, which comes after this storm of abuse, is unlike any other in modern literature. In the final paragraph of The Stranger, Camus does not "sum up" his hero's fate, but leads him into a breathtaking vision of new life in the face of death.
"I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--so like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
