The Trial of Meursault: Inquests and Counter-inquests

This essay focuses on Kamel Daoud’s “response” to Albert Camus’s L’Étranger by highlighting the differences in and implications of their writing styles and narrative voices. Daoud’s narrative refigures the concept of the absurd and his linkage of Camus’s silences to the colonial condition. However, the colonial legacy continues to pervade Daoud’s own narrative particularly in his portrayal of contemporary Algeria and Islam. There are unresolved contradictions in the fabric of Daoud’s text as well as a silence that emerges from a hyperbolic bavardage.