I state it here so that there shall be no doubt in any reader's mind about the central preoccupation of my book. The publication of the outsider brought me some interesting insights. It received more attention than I or my publisher had activities. In the outsider, all men lose their lives in living them. All men are failures. Seven chapters of the book aimed at presenting and documenting, as fully as possible, the concept of the futility of human life, and also at trying to pinpoint the outsider's occasional sense of a way out of the futility.