Albert Camus The Plague

The Leap of Faith
In The Plague, Albert Camus uses visual imagery, symbolism and allegory to demonstrate and illustrate the ‘leap of faith” we as humans take in life to take direction and control. This shows us what we as people are proficient at, and what we can do.
Camus wrote an extensive variety of work including short stories, theatres, essays, philosophical tracts, and tons of novels—throughout his relatively small career he was largely known for his work The Stranger and The Plague. Camus was also known for his charm and success with women. He often hinted at being an ‘outsider” in the world, in his novels (McKee).
During his childhood, Camus grew up in Algeria and his family was in poverty. He had a strict, cruel, devious grandmother and a quiet, detached, hard-working mother. His father was dead. Going to school was the only time Camus got to escape his unhappy living situation. Once Camus had taken some money from his grandmother that was for errands, he took it, went to a soccer game and he had gotten into trouble for doing so. (McKee)
Camus actually thought he wasn’t a part of society. He felt lost, like an outsider. In Camus’s book The Stranger, Meursault had found himself adrift from society, he thought he was in a meaningless, isolated society. He had lost all abstract and ethical foundation.

Two characters in the book, Rieux and Rambert, both are parted from the women they love. Many other unknown people are separated from loved ones in other towns or from those who happened to be out of town when the gates of Oran were shut. The whole town feels in exile, since it is completely secluded from the outside world due to the illness. Rieux, as the storyteller, defines what exile meant to all of them: “[T]hat sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.”