أفكار وآفاق
Volume 13, Numéro 2, Pages 117-136
2025-11-30

Existential Crisis Of The Subaltern And The Colonizer: The Search For Self In Camus' The Stranger And Wright's Native Son



Authors : Denidni Samira .

Abstract

Focusing on two major novels, Richard Wright’s Native Son and Albert Camus' The Stranger, this article aims to discuss the colonizer/colonized interaction and identity issues, in Jim Crowed America and Colonial Algeria. It examines how physical and psychological oppression and segregation constitute the factors of the identity crisis of both the subaltern and the colonizer. Relying on Fanonian theories of Manichaeism, inferiority complex, violence, Kurt Lewin's Field Theory and Albert Camus' The Absurd, this study addresses existential issues of African Americans and French Algerians, focusing on the Manichean environment and its consequences. It illustrates how the two authors use the Manichean world in the aforementioned novels to depict the essential effects of the oppressive environment that determines Bigger Thomas’ and Meursault’s fates and behaviors. The analysis reveals that in both novels, the Manichean world shapes space, identity and moral perception, fostering alienation, violence and existential crises. Juxtaposing Richard Wright's explicit portrayal of racist segregation with Albert Camus' implicit depiction of colonial hierarchy, this reading shows how different narrative strategies can expose or obscure the mechanisms of oppression. Eventually, this article argues that the colonial and racialized worlds in the two novels function as existential sites in which both colonizer and colonized, Meursault and Bigger Thomas, are entrapped and their identities fractured by the very systems that define them.

Keywords

Native Son, The Stranger, Existentialism, Existential Crisis, Manichaeism, Otherness, Subaltern.

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