The Existential Capital

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir argued that humans are condemned to be free — that meaning is not given but must be created through choices. Albert Camus's The Stranger featured a narrator so detached from conventional emotion that his honesty became an indictment of society's demand for performed feelings.

"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday." Camus opened The Stranger with the most unsettling first line in French literature. Meursault's deliberate emotional numbness defined existentialist fiction and shocked readers into questioning their own assumed feelings — are our emotions genuine, or simply the performances society expects of us?