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Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Existentialism and Albert Camus The Plague Essay

Existentialism and The Plague In the mid 1940s, a man by the name of Albert Camus began to write a story. This story he called La Pestà ©. Written in French, the novel became extremely popular and has since been translated numerous times into many languages. This story has been read over and over, yet it tells more than it seems to. This story tells the tale of a city gripped by a deadly disease. This is true enough, but this is not what the novel is about. The Plague can be read as an allegory of World War II, of the French Resistance against German Occupation. To simplify things, one can say that The Plague is an allegorical novel (Picon 146). This however, is indeed an oversimplification, and so this only tells part of the†¦show more content†¦For Camus, on the other hand, a mans acts could reveal an intrinsic integrity or dignity which were always there but which had laid dormant and unasserted until he was made to face the absurdity of his mortal condition in an immortal universe (Masters 107). Key to understanding this is that the integrity is unasserted. Camus believed that man was more than just a shell to begin with, that there is some basic worth to a man. Within each man Camus believed that there is a spark of goodness which only he himself could fan into a flame. While man may have innate goodness, what Camus saw in the world more often was indifference, inaction. Mankind failed to act on this goodness. Camus addresses this indifference in The Plague. Camus wrote this novel during a tumultuous time in history, World War II. Even before the war had begun, Camus saw this indifference. Camus watched as the nations of Western Europe sat idly by as Hitlers Germany seized lands, building his Reich. These lands believed they could ignore the problems Hitler was causing; they believed they could appease Hitler and leave it at that. Suddenly, France had fallen under German control and England was at the mercy of German bombers. These events helped to prompt Camus into writing The Plague. The war which Camus witnessed was transformed into the guise of a deadly disease. However, Camus does not merely attack the events of one war, norShow MoreRelated Existentialism in Albert Camus The Plague and Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot945 Words   |  4 Pages All of the characters in The Plague and Waiting For Godot exist in their fictional worlds. However, none is able to explain why. Neither work gives the reader an explanation of human existence except to say that humans exist. Providing an answer to the question of existence would constitute a paradox. 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