"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 the North African coastline, "Oran." The details of everyday life he describes with almost journalistic veracity: from the mixture of Spanish and French emigres that stratify society, to the marginalization of the North Africans themselves, who are all-but-invisible in this colonial enclave. The North African climate is the major "foreign" character in The Plague, a hot-dry, wind-bleached environ where "[t]he seasons are discriminated only in the sky... a t...