Discuss the style that Camus uses in The Stranger.Discuss two specific moments, words, phrases, sentences, that shock or upset or intrigue etc....

Albert Camus uses a plain / tough narrative style,
featuring a detached narrator.  Meursault matter-of-factly opens the novel with one of
the most deadpan openings ever:

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Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t
know. I had a telegram from home: ‘mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours
sincerely.’ That doesn’t mean anything. It may have been
yesterday.

There's a couple
of ways to look at Meursault's tone.  First, he narrates from prison (death row), so he
may be under such duress that he cannot remember the day she dies.  Or, as most people
suggest, Meursault does not remember, or even care what day his mother died, because he
does not concern himself with the culture of death.  In other words, Meursault's tone is
fatalistic because he feels he is being condemned by a deterministic culture that
negates free will.

Another key passage is the murder
narration:

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“At the same instant the sweat in my eyebrows
dripped down over my eyelids all at once and covered them with a warm, thick film. My
eyes were blinded behind the curtain of tears and salt. All I could feel were the
cymbals of sunlight crashing on my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear flying
up from the knife in front of me. The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and
stabbed at my stinging eyes. That’s when everything began to reel. The sea carried up a
thick, fiery breath. It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other
to rain down fire. My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The
trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp
and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and sun.
I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach
where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the
bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the
door of unhappiness.”

Here,
Meursault uses much sensory imagery and metaphorical language, featuring the sun and
knife.  The plain / tough style of Camus' narrator is patterned after Ernest Hemingway's
macho journalistic style.  The "tough guy" word choice is full of the
following:

• -high frequency
  words


• -monosyllabic
  words


• -contractions,
  articles


• -1st person
  pronouns


• -action verbs, active
  tense


• -colloquial


• -Anglo-Saxon
  words


• -simple
  sentences


• -short,
  choppy


• -compound sentences (lots of coordinating
  conjunctions “and”)


• -1st Person (I
  –oriented)