Confessional discourse and stream of consciousness: existential text asunrealised confession in The Stranger by Albert Camus

Any spiritually or emotionally importanthuman contact, one based on the striving for mutual understanding, aside from its own intrinsicmeaning, inevitably implies confession, that is self-exposure to another person. The process of selfrealizationunderlying the state of confession is dramatically different from the stream ofconsciousness, as it applies to existential writers (Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others).Given that consciousness and its perception is one of the main themes of existential literature, acomparison with the mentality of confession enables us to explore why any attempts of spiritual selffulfilmentby the existential hero turn into the spirit of the absurd and the rebellion for him. Thestream of consciousness of the speech we encounter in The Stranger embodies the main drama of theexistential hero - the inability to achieve the state of confession while feeling subconscious need for it.The difference between confessional and existential states of mind openly manifests itself in thecharacter's point of view and in the language expressing this point of view.Existential text reveals the drama of an individualistic mind striving to escape its shell - theinvisible barrier separating a person from the world and impassable by self-exposure without a basicconfessional intention. The intimate sincerity of such exchanges is almost always deficient; existentialexpression occupies the precipitous border between the unconscious desire to live up to the confessionand the threat of degrading into a lifeless discourse, devoid of the flow of one's own language. Thereason for the degradation of existential expression into style lies not only in the nature of the worditself, but rather in the nature of mentality the word manifests. Just as existential mentality deceivesitself in an attempt to achieve the confessional state of mind, the existential word is also about selfdeceitand illusion while trying to seem transparent, null and blank (Roland Barthes).Confessional expression takes a different path to purity, transparency, and sincerity. It does notattempt to deceive through the unexamined purity of its language; confessional language is cognizantof the surrounding polyphonic semantic aura and does not demur from participation in this dialogue.Confessional expression understands that the only way to deal with such internal dialogue is not toreject it, but to accept the dialogic nature of confession. Only by accepting the existence of alienmeanings and not denouncing them or rejecting them out of hand can one come to understand onesown core sense and thus discover without preconceptions how these senses relate to each other.

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