A few year back I was listening to a lecture (on a CD) on Buddhism by Joseph Campbell: "you are not your thoughts: think about your random thoughts and suppress them. Then ponder the inner observer of your own thoughts and try to quell that as well." (I'm paraphrasing from a distant memory, this is the best link I found that seems to echo the lecture)
I then turned on the radio (or switched CDs?) and caught the 1978 Cure classic "Killing an Arab" and was struck with a new perspective on Camus' "The Stranger". The novel has always been strangely haunting despite what I would consider a weak plot and and a flat writing style.
Suddenly it now seemed to me that the power of "L'Etranger" was that there were two main characters, not one as I had always assumed. In addition to the narrator, there is his own inner observer of his own thoughts. (or maybe the narrator is the inner observer? - I need to reread the novel). Does the novel haunt me because Camus is prodding us to contemplate our inner observer as distinct from the rest of our "engaged" personality? Camus is asking us "what is the self?" just like the Buddhist meditation does.
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