ABSTRACT
Robert Smith, the band’s lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter, attempted to head off the controversy by explaining that the song, originally released in 1978, was based on the central incident in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger and that it recounts the Frenchman Meursault’s seemingly gratuitous murder of an Arab. Smith’s account of the source of the song’s lyrics is supported by the general correspondence between events in the song and the novel’s central scene; the line in the chorus “I’m the stranger”; and the use of sun, sea, and sky images that are also pervasive in Camus’s text.2
