Camus' The Plague

"To be or not to be," Hamlet's famous question, would have no meaning to existentialist Albert Camus in his novel The Plague: one is, would be his response to such a query - the trick lies in how one lives through that being. This is not a play on words. Nor is it avoidance of the issue. The world Camus lived in was far more violent and absurd than any William Shakespeare could have imagined - and Shakespeare lived in a pretty violent world at that - but never was Camus given to such a weak-willed contemplation of an individual's existence as Hamlet exhibits. His concept of existence in The Plague was far more cruel than any cozy Elsinore castle. In this world created by Albert Camus, a reflection of the life and times in which he lived, one could easily "be or not be" at the whim of fate - not one's own self-determination. Within those seemingly helpless boundaries of existence, however, Camus contemplates the meaning of will.

No writer is totally inventive. Some creators of fiction, of course, offer only thinly-disguised adornments of their autobiographies; others hide behind layers of metaphor. Even writers of nonfiction, if they are honest, must admit to being influenced in their choice of subject, phrasing, interpretation, et cetera, by personal influences of experience. Albert Camus did little to disguise the autobiographical elements in his works.

Born in the French colony of Algeria in 1913, he sets his novel The Plague in a mythical French city in on

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only days before. A narrator attempts to recount the ensuing ordeal, preferring anonymity and declaring in both the first and final pages that he "has confined himself to describing only such things as he was enabled to see for himself, and has refrained from attributing to his fellow sufferers thoughts that, when all is said and done, they were not bound to have" (301). When the narrator finally reveals himself, we are not surprised to learn that it is Rieux, a doctor central to the narrative. Rieux's futile medical efforts to fight the disease recall Camus' writing activities on behalf of the Resistance: both can identify the problem, isolate it and describe it - but neither one's particular skill has any effect upon the outcome of the plague/war's progress. Rieux is not the sole focus of The Plague, just as Camus did not deceive himself with boasts of being the center of the Resistance. Assembled around Rieux are a group of characters recalling the composition of a Resistance guerilla cell. The two most prominent personalities represent opposite ends of the belief spectrum: Paneloux, a priest, and Tarrou, a humanistic idealist. They stand for the odd alliance of Church and Communist that characterized the Resistance.

Category: Literature - C