ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that estranging and discordant narration mostly depends on ideological discourses that are being used to create the critical doubt and distance necessary to render a problematic narrative reliability. It argues that only by attending to the colonial discourses present in French Algeria from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s can estranging and discordant narration be apprehended as the key device that informs the politics of form in L’etranger. The chapter also shows that the politics of form is crucial in those categories of unreliability. It also argues that Meursault’s non-affective first-person narrative is an “estranging narrative” that uses underreporting as an ideological strategy common in colonial discourse, which suggests that the narrative can be read as discordant. Albert Camus uses a variety of colonial discourses on French Algeria to restate the rhetorical discrimination against the Arabs.
