With America's growing commitment to global education and intercultural understanding, one option for reading foreign literature is to study the text from a cross-cultural perspective, decoding the cultural assumptions both in the work and in the reader's perceptions of that work. Contrasting elements of the French and American value systems, of the languages themselves, the constructs of role expectations and their variations, and the perception of past and future shows how communication interference or misreading of a French text by an American student can occur. "L'Etranger" by Albert Camus is an appropriate work to demonstrate cross-cultural reading because it is stylistically, thematically, and historically a classic. It offers a cross-cultural appreciation of several structures including the importance of tradition, the use of models, the privileged place of deductive reasoning, culture-bound role expectations, action chains, sensory overload, nonviolent signs of aggression, and the notions of honor, family, and ego. (MSE)