[fantasyfan]

The introduction to the book is excellent. It's clear that Camus didn't like to be pigeon-holed as an existentialist or an apostle of the philosophy of the "absurd"--which can be defined in several different ways. The idea that the universe is absurd in the sense that it is devoid of any of the meaningfulness and rationality that we search for in life--what Yeats called its "murderous innocence" is a theme that certainly can be relevant to the novel. Personally, I think that Defoe illustrated this idea in his A Journal of the Plague Year better than Camus. But of course that's only my opinion and even if one disagrees with it, a comparison and contrast of the two works may throw light on both.