The Plague, Albert Camus
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The Plague, Albert Camus
Introduction
The plague is a novel written about the plague that happened in Algeria, Oran, where it started from the rat and later to human beings. This condition spreads and sends people into isolation and quarantine (Bree, Pg 93-100). The people were subjected to strict rules by the authorities on sanitation measures, and they placed the whole city in quarantine. This paper will on the narrative styles used by Camus in his novel. It will also make us understand how Foucault’s work helps us understand Camus’s work and how Sontag’s readings on epidemics help us understand the novel, The Plague.
Discussion
Susan Sontag wrote that the main feature of a plague is its sources, and the disease must be coming from somewhere else. There is a link between imagining foreignness and imagining the disease. Camus’ story is based on a group of men defined by their group, and they are up against the plague. The story takes us through the calculation, fear, and courage that we hear and read through in every story from the plagues that befalls the community like Ebola and the current case of Covid-19. I think Camus’ story is a literal and allegorical reading which signifies a Third Reich. Camus predicted that the next plague would rise its rats again. He was aware of great cholera, which had befallen the people of Oran in Algeria.
In today’s world, La Peste tells another story of a different kind of plague. The one plague is turbo-capitalism, hyper-materialist, destructive, and a plague that can do so well and applied in a contemporary commentary (Rossi, Pg. 399-422). Camus’s novel examines the reason behind the word “Absurd,” where he says our society is absurd. It is moralizing to learn that our relationships are based on the absurdity of modern existence. The irony in this story is the treatment of freedom where Oran citizens become prisoners, and the city is subjected to total quarantine. Still, the big question is whether they were really free even before the plague. Their habits had strictly enslaved their lives, which leaves a question on whether they were really alive before. Quarantine separated them from their friends and families, and lovers intensively loved each other, but before they took their loved ones for granted. The philosophy of the story is the amalgam of humanism and existentialism. The author Camus was an atheist who did not believe in suffering, death, and human beings’ existence had any rational or intrinsic moral meaning. He believed human beings are mortals, completely absurd to death, irrational, and live under inexplicable since he did not believe in the afterlife or God. He never believed that individuals could give meaning to their lives, and the most meaningful action he believed in is the philosophy to choose to fight suffering and death.
In the first days of the epidemic, the Oran people were different and treated one another differently, and they were selfish in nature. They left each individual to suffer on their own. The epidemic wears them for months, and many Oran citizens joined the anti-plague efforts. This taught them that it was a collective responsibility to fight the epidemic, and they had to break the gap of alienation that had been the habit of the community. This gave them meaning to their lives since they collectively chose to fight death. Some flew the city while others refused to join the fight against the epidemic hence surrendering them to the absurd death which claimed their lives. The rebellion against suffering death proved futile, and few efforts were registered on the anti-plague efforts. Camus notes that rebellion is nonetheless a noble and meaningful struggle even if the end is defeating. This shows how Camus has beliefs of optimism even in times where there is no hope. As the people decide to fight against the plague, they increased their chances of contracting the plague as they fight against death, but at the same time, they knew that they will still contract it if they sit down and do nothing at all. This leaves the people with meaningless choices like choosing between death and death, but the citizens choose to act and fight for themselves, which makes the community a meaningful community. In this way, they started defining themselves.
Foucault’s plague is attained through the cultural status and characterization of Bentham’s infamous prison design. In his theory, Michel Foucault uses biopolitics and biopower to articulate his issues (Felman, Pg 113-139). He argues that institutions like prisons, schools, and hospitals serve a role in reinforcing power structures and a chapter in punish and discipline, which addresses power related play in the context of the panopticon and quarantine. Camus’s story can be related to this theory, where he argued that commitment to a distant and single course endangers all of them. The struggle to have a perfect society in the future will lead to many people being casualties of the situations in the present day. The fear made him describe Marx as “the prophet of justice without mercy which lies, by mistake, in the unbeliever’s plot at High gate Cemetery.” He observed that the Marxist’s spirit and hope lie in the promise of utopia, which was irrational and powerful as that of the religious followers.
Secondly, he defended the propositions that the existentialists and Marxists denied in human nature that the people share all the traits. This belief is that we can infer what is worse or better for all the individuals and a common ground on which social bonds are formed. Sartre argued that we are the products of our choices and nothing more. According to the understanding of Simone de Beauvoir about the Marxists, he referred to it that there is no authentic human essence which can be realized, that there is no alienated human obscured by false mediations, that there is no harmonious unity that can be returned and that there will be no organized wholeness which can be achieved. From his Universalist skepticism and humanism view of utopian ideologies, he developed an attitude on ethics about Man in Revolt who rejected revolution. He instead states that moral progress comes from the united people rejecting injustices when they recognize injustice against them. This kind of rejection is more of an impulse revolutionary. It shows a measure where it respects and recognizes human nature, access no limits on freedom of speech and expression, and attempts to improve things.
Sometimes novels can define our current world and make sense to the world we live in, and even as much we try to escape reality, it will always hit us. It is hard sometimes to face things we often read in the past, and the only thing that we can see out of it is to escape reality. This book reflects the current state of the world where the outbreak of coronavirus has accompanied it, and in a way, it reflects the story, and it has dual yearning. In this story, we find some genres are more than others while we have seen fiction setting the greatest sight, and all these have been reflected in the current events of the ongoing apocalypses, tales of epidemics, and end of the world.
The book in itself picked on the pandemic the plague by Albert Camus, which has become a global sensation. This is a story that was set about the epidemic and the locked off from the world. The story has struck in a more literal light about an infections disease that no longer represents the Nazi people but informs of an infectious disease called covid-19. We all can relate to the residents of Camus’ Oran. The book shows how to behave during a pandemic and the guide to survive the pandemic. This has revealed itself in a way that we see La Peste as the vaccine. We can have this and say we are safely protected from the plague; there are a few tricks from the story that one can pick and survive the pandemic and will keep us safe or at least sane. There is no actual vaccine at this stage, but the prescriptions from the plague aren’t far from what is being practiced currently. The cure for the virus can never be perfect, but we are using this novel as a masterpiece as we try to talk about the pandemic moments. In Oran street, when many rats started dying, the first cases of the human symptoms emerged, and the plague shows the same characteristics of coronavirus, where it has been witnessed in many countries. The same way the plague came from the west and spread is the same way coronavirus has spread to the world from seafood.
Conclusion
Camus’s observation cannot be categorized as prophetic but as astute. It reflects on the awareness of the future pandemics and epidemics, which can play out similarly soon. The virus is not incontrovertible and has sent everyone into lockdown, just like how Oran people were closed off from the world. The world now is in exile and isolation as they struggle to find vaccines that can help the world to get back to its normal activities.
Work cited
Bree, Germaine. “Albert Camus and the Plague.” Yale French Studies 8 (1951): 93-100.
Felman, Shoshana. “Camus’ The Plague, or a monument to witnessing.” Testimony. Routledge, 2013. 113-139.
Rossi, Louis R. “Albert Camus: The Plague of Absurdity.” The Kenyon Review 20.3 (1958): 399-422.