Camus writes at the end of The Stranger, “And I, too, [referring to his mother] felt ready to start life all over again.” To me that rings hollow. Surely life is mostly suffering, as Buddhism holds, and even as Camus admits, for example, in speaking of the worst time of day being when he wakes up in the morning to get ready to go to work at his employer’s; so surely one cannot be ready to “start life all over again.”
Somehow, though, Camus’ “negative novel” (as Elaine and others regard it) can be raised to a positive philosophy by blending it with Buddhism—i.e. escaping suffering by not being born again.
When I first read The Stranger as an undergraduate I completely identified with it; my inner life was like Meursault’s. In the final paragraph of the book Meursault says “I’d been happy and…I was happy still” and he lays his heart open to “the benign indifference of the universe”—a wonderful phrase that I have used often. Now, however, I see that phrase in the context of science—i.e. philosophy from Democritus to Darwin—that transcends the happiness of the individual to the happiness that can be achieved in spite of the suffering brought by natural selection to human beings (beings aware of their awarenesses).
Another perspective on Meursault is that he could be regarded as autistic–emotionally unresponsive and flat. For example, when he is asked by his neighbor, suspected of being a pimp, whether he is disgusted by the terrible way Salerno has treated his dog for eight years, Meursault answers, “No.”