The Plague Albert Camus Research Paper

French literature of the 1940s was driven by the pessimistic philosophical school of thought, absurdism. Albert Camus’ writings represent a branch of absurdism, existentialism, which questions the inherent meaning of life. In novels such as The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explores existential tenets, including the immediate pleasures of the physical world versus greater spiritual meaning and what is one’s purpose during one’s life experience. In The Plague, Camus traces the societal reactions to death and disease and the immediate reactions of isolation. In this novel Camus, as a staunch absurdist, uses a contagion as a vehicle to rebuke the two most powerful constructs of belief: the religious and scientific answer to our inevitable

The advantages of having faith are directly expressed in Paneloux’s sermon: “the love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours” (Camus, Plague, 205). If we refuse to believe in God, we are left with an absurd world in which nothing has a purpose. The incomprehensibility of a child’s torture is replaced by its meaningless, and most would find it easier to handle suffering if there is a reason that simply surpasses our understanding than if there is no reason or justification whatsoever. However, Camus does not want to go so far as to endorse the belief in God simply as a way of handling life’s difficulties. Indeed, if everyone merely accepted all suffering as a part of the divine plan, what reason would we have to try to diminish that suffering? This is the attitude expressed by Rieux when Tarrou asks him what reasons he has to struggle against the plague. Rieux explains that he does not know—he does not do it out of pride nor out of any desire for a reward—but he merely sees that there are sick people and he is inclined to defend them. When asked against whom he is defending them, Rieux again replies that he does not know, but that he has seen enough death to make him outraged at the entire

Because of this situation, humans have three options in life: to commit suicide, to make a “leap of faith” and choose to believe in a divine entity or order, or to accept the Absurd and create one’s own meaning in life. Camus advocated this third choice, as the first option is a kind of cowardice and the second is a psychological lie that Camus even compared to suicide. In The Plague, the besieged town becomes a microcosm of the universe, and the different characters illustrate different ways humans deal with the Absurd – that is, the plague. Cottard first tries to commit suicide (because of his guilt, another kind of plague) and then works with the epidemic, profiting off of others’ suffering. Father Paneloux tries to assign order to the plague (as a punishment from God), but when he is faced with the true nature of the Absurd through watching a child die, Paneloux loses his faith and succumbs to disease himself. The protagonists of the novel, Rieux, Rambert, and Tarrou, live and struggle in the way that Camus advocates. They recognize the Absurd (the power of the plague and their own inevitable doom) but still work ceaselessly against it, finding meaning in healing