THE PLAGUE

Everyday life in Oran takes an ominous turn when dead rats begin to appear all of a sudden. Soon, their number becomes overwhelming and people start to die. Gradually, the rats disappear. Cats disappear. Dogs disappear. People continue to die. The landscape appears devoid of life. Resources become scarce. one wants to stay but no one can leave. The city’s gates are closed. The Plague is a keen observation of daily life in quarantine. And much more. It is a story of our virtues and vices when we are put to the test: of our behavior when death is imminent. It is also viewed as an allergory of the French response to Nazi occupation of France in the World War II.


About the AuthorAlbert Camus was a French-Algerian writer, philosopher and journalist. He was born in Mondovi, French Algeria on vember 7, 1913. Although not trained as a philosopher, he contributed towards the avant-garde twentieth-century philosophical ideas of Absurdism in the form of essays, novels, reviews and articles. He also became active in the resistance against the colonial French government and served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Combat from 1944 to 1947. Camus established himself as a fiction writer with his three novels: The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956). His philosophical books The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), and The Rebel (1951) proved him to be a forceful thinker. Because of his formidable impact on the world of letters in the second half of the twentieth century, he was awarded the prestigious bel Prize in 1957 for illuminating “the problems of the human conscience.” He was only 44 years old at the time. He died in an automobile accident at the age of 46.