Eighteenth-century novels like Gulliver's Travels typically parachute an outsider into a society that they struggle to understand. When Albert Camus wrote The Stranger in 1942, his protagonist expounds from this rational dissociation from the world a theory pertaining to existence itself. As a consequence of his reason, man is at odds not only with his fellow man, but with the entire world. "The stranger is man confronting the world," wrote Sartre in his exegesis of The Stranger, Explication de L'Etranger.

“Existentialism is self-indulgent,” Highsmith opined in an interview with Diana Cooper-Clark. Yet the murders in her novel are framed by existentialism: "Only the mysterious fact of the thing remained, the mystery and the miracle of stopping life" (106). Camus's Meursault and Highsmith's protagonists follow an Oedipal path forged by their preoccupation with the absurdity of human life: "It was all false and didn't exist" (152).

Initially resisting involvement in World War II, the Roosevelt administration sought to assume the role of the "arsenal of democracy," selling weapons to Europe. Money in Highsmith's novel is blood money. Guy muses early in the novel: "the desperate boredom of the wealthy […] It tended to destroy rather than create. And it could lead to crime just as easily as privation" (22).