Though Meursault could easily have been depicted, the sequence and nature of the story's events remaining entirely the same, as a sort of villain, Albert Camus forces the reader into a grudging sympathy with him. Meursault is, indeed, a tragic sort of hero, if only because the reader is made always aware of the reasons of his choices, and the nature of the depression plaguing him.
If one were to have been told that Meursault murdered an Arab, then this would be enough for the reader to indict him as an evil character. But Meursault kills the man because he doesn't care, and because he cannot care. Why should this matter, at all? There is no consequence in his world. Meursault was punished always for his remoteness from the world by his inability to experience pleasure(his relationship with his girlfriend being entirely a feelingless relationship of utility, the offer of a promotion at work not appealing to him any more than his current, "lesser" position). Once the reader understands how far removed Meursault is from the usual human conditions of life, one sympathizes with Meursault for one's own knowledge of his consistency within the system in which he functions. And this is an aspect of mankind that a literary vehicle exploits well: every man's actions become justifiable when one wholly understands them, when one knows the whys and the hows of the actor, when one knows the pain or joylessness of the individual. If a person is placed in Meursault's world, in his moral and emotional system, then that person finds Meursault very much innocent of any crime.
Certainly, this was a very effective means of demonstrating Camus' existentialist agenda. Here is a man condemned to death, merely because he has ceased to feel! If only the rest of the world understood! Still, one is not entirely convinced of the validity of the argument. Meursault is, in effect, indifferent to his own death. Is there not a line to be drawn, cannot even the fact that he is faced with his own death move him to regain some will, some inkling of defiance? Perhaps the point Camus intended to make in Meursault not resisting his death was the point that Meursault, like everyone else, was already dead--he more so, for his more advanced knowledge of the conditions of life.
I, for one, cannot help but be tempted to believe that Camus' beautiful, touching story is, like the large part of existentialist thought, little more than educated, literary manifestation of a personal depression. To liken the fate of Sisyphus to the fate of man is to liken the fate of man to the fate of Sisyphus, and this is as much a sham as the sham of Ayn Rand's "happy" atheism, which it inverts (Camus once said that one of the preconditions of happiniess is ambitionlessness). No, healthy humankind does not strive toward nothing, for nothing, but rather toward something, for betterment. Satisfaction is not a myth, and though defiance is indeed a very necessary and central human ideal, it is not an end. A human being cannot and does not continue to live without hope--or perhaps he does, but not happily. Sisyphus was indeed punished for his crime, as he was forced to live the life of Albert Camus: sad, pointless, faithless, repetitive, cold from Randian skepticism.
Meursault, for all of the profound aspects of alienation his life neatly depicts, was a man who failed to connect with the world. He was not able to understand the significance of the death of his mother, nor was he receptive to the feelings of his girlfriend, nor even to his own needs, the things that might please him; and if there merely were no things (impossible in reality), then his death was not in vain, and we should all be as satisfied with it as he was.
But I am not satisfied with it. Meursault is only true and useful because he exaggerates some of the darker conditions of humankind: resignation to the will of the world, skepticism, meaninglessness. If he were an actual man, I might punch him in the face, and prove to him that, despite all his joylessness and painlessness, he is indeed, whether he wants to be or not, a thing that feels and reacts.
There is no book that I know of that better captures modernity's sense of spiritual dissolution than The Stranger. Meursault is quite weary, after so many centuries. He has had enough.