The Stranger

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Many stories convey messages about the meaning, value, or purpose of life. They tell you how to think and behave if you want to live a good and happy life. But some stories promote unusual ideas that not everyone agrees with. What advice about life do you think everyone can agree with? Write a list of three to five ideas about life’s meaning, purpose, or value that you think any reader would agree with.

Teaching Suggestion and Helpful Links: As students share their ideas, challenge their thinking by showing them that any idea about life’s Meaning, value, or purpose can be disagreed with by someone. Ask them whether “majority rules” is a good way to determine if an idea is true or false, or whether there are times when a single person might be more right about something than the majority. Introduce one of the key ideas of Existentialism: that meaning, value, and purpose are determined by the individual.

• Logically Fallacious’s entry on appeals to common belief explaining why arguments based on the popularity of an idea are logically flawed.
• The Ethics Centre’s entry describing Existentialism.

Short Activity

Think about the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” It sends clear messages about obeying your elders and avoiding strangers, among others. But what if it didn’t? Your group will be given a secret number (either a “1” or a “2”). If you have a “1,” your group’s job is to write a short revision of the Red Riding Hood story that has no meaning at all. If you have a “2,” your group’s job is to write a short revision of the story that conveys the idea that no one else can tell you what is best for you; you should just live authentically, according to your own personal ideas about the world. You will present your story to the rest of the class (assign each group member a reading role: narrator, Little Red Riding Hood, father, mother, wolf, etc.) and your audience will guess whether your group is a “1” or a “2.”

Teaching Suggestion and Helpful Links: As students perform their stories and make guesses about whether they are seeing something “meaningless” or “Existential,” prompt them to think about the difference between a story with no meaning, a story that questions the idea of universal meanings and values, and a story that promotes a single, universal meaning or value.

• A site that defines existentialism and gives explanations of various existential quotes found in classic literature.
• A site that briefly explains the characteristics of existential literature and links to several examples.