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Literary Analysis: The Plague By Albert Camus

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In my essay I will be discussing the link between the different ways of reading “The Plague” (by Albert Camus, published in 1947) (Google Books, 2014). There is of course the literal story of a plague, then there is the metaphorical meaning of the Nazi Occupation, and when you look deeper into the book, you find that all of this is based around not just the Nazi occupation but a “darkness” - which symbolises pure evil. This evil is not literally the devil, but a more complicated way of referring to Existentialism (Miclaus, 2014). There is an order of reading this book and by analysing it, we come to an understanding with how the three themes come together into a bigger picture. When you start reading the novel you are aware of reading about …show more content…

When we look at the people in the small town of Oran and how they differ before the outbreak of the plague and after the quarantine, we get a sense of what Camus is trying to get at. Father Paneloux’s mind-set, for example, is one of many that changes about the plague and resisting it. In Claudia Miclaus’s analysis of “The Plague” she states that people realised the importance of resisting the plague. After having suffered through it, witnessing the extensive amount of deaths, it was crucial that the remaining living souls would have to work together to overcome the plague (Miclaus, 2014). When we look at the language that is used in Father Paneloux’s sermon, we bear witness to another theme that comes into play: the theme of The Plague being a metaphysical idea of Evil: “we walk in the darkness… in the thick darkness of this plague.” (Father Paneloux’s first …show more content…

These movements were a response to war and the unbelievable number of dead that were recorded in the time period between World War I and II. Existentialism was all about the absurdity of life and that life was a queue for death. Existentialists believed in the reality of the present and that anyone could die in the most inhumane manner, with or without hope of god awaiting them in afterlife. It was mostly just about the hope that people had of living another day. There was just death and destruction and the philosophy that became a mind-set that was based around nothingness (Aronson,

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