At least from my perspective, the trial is meant to be contrived and a farce. From Meursault's perspective (which I agree that he can be an unreliable narrator) everything happening around him is inconsequential; he reflects that death-even of someone so "close" to him as his mother-doesn't matter as the end would always come. Meursault is on trial for his disposition, rather than the actual murder. The prosecution argues that Meursault is guilty due to his aloofness rather than any discussion of the murder (the defense openly questions whether Meursault is on trial for the murder of the arab or the murder of his mother!). At least for me, this difference was what _The Stranger_ was about; this inherent clash between indifference and the human rejection of the "gentle indifference of the universe". The fact that Meursault's unreliable narrator aspect comes about of the confrontation between the priest(?) and himself makes me think that Meursault too was hiding under this coating of lucidity, where he (and others who pretend to be stoics in the face of the absurd) will eventually break down. I reccomend reading _The Myth of Sisyphus_, especially the third and fourth parts, for Camus' explanation of the absurd hero.

Also, could you link the critiques? They sound interesting and I'd like to read them.

The problem as I see it is in the fact that the book describes the world very naturalistically. The first half of the book is basically Proust, if Proust were less introspective and didn't care to inflate his word count. It's actually rare to find a book where the events of day-to-day life -- running to catch a tram, or spending a lazy Sunday afternoon on one's balcony -- are relayed with such clarity and directness.

Then the murder happens -- which was a highly contrived and even quite ridiculous scenario, in that (a) Mersault's party was quite literally being stalked by an armed gang, (b) Mersault separated himself from the pack and was menaced by one of his stalkers, who was armed with a knife, (c) the naked knife was in the man's hand, as that man was blocking Mersault's path, (d) there were no witnesses, and (e) Mersault was a Frenchman in colonial French Algeria.

Not 1 in 10000 times does that go to court for murder, and not 1 in 1000000 times does it result in the death penalty.

But, anyway, back to my point: The minute the murder happens, we're yanked out of the naturalistic world and thrust directly into the world of Kafka's The Trial. Nothing makes sense any longer. What once was so true-to-life becomes something akin to the hallucinatory descent of divine justice -- a bad trip, a fever dream. "Yeah, you're off to the guillotine because you didn't cry at your wife's funeral." The most parsimonious interpretation is that the narrator has simply lost his mind.

Don't even get me started on the fact that every reviewer thinks that Mersault was executed, when that never actually happens in the book, and would result in him not being able to write the book in the first place. (Further confused by the variety of tenses used in the construction of the prose.)

As to the critiques, the Orientalist one is in Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism" but I don't think that the full version is online.