Analysis of the novel by A. Camus - "The Plague"
3. The symbolic image of the plague in the novel
philosophical novel camus plague
Simultaneously with the start of work on the second version of the work (January 1943), a deep rethinking of the very image of the plague takes place. If at first he had the vague features of an inexplicable disaster, combined in the mind of the writer with the onset of war, now the novelist seeks to present Evil in him, that is, a certain necessity of the existing world order. At the same time, the anti-Christian orientation of his thought predetermined all the acuteness of the eternal problem of theodicy - how to reconcile the existence of Evil with the goodness, wisdom, omnipotence and justice of God - which turned out to be at the center of the worldview conflict of the novel.
The storm of ancient and medieval cities, the plague in the 20th century, seems to have been eradicated. Meanwhile, the chronicle dated quite accurately - 194 ... year. The date is immediately alarming: then the word "plague" was on everyone's lips - "brown plague". A little further on, the casual remark that the plague, like war, has always taken people by surprise, strengthens the flashed guess. The plague is a metaphor already fixed in everyday usage. Why, however, did Camus need to resort instead to the historical hints of an allegorical parable? While working on The Plague, he wrote in his diary: “With the help of the plague, I want to convey the atmosphere of suffocation from which we suffered, the atmosphere of danger and exile in which we lived then. At the same time, I want to extend this interpretation to existence in general. The catastrophe that shook France, in the eyes of Camus, was a catalyst that made the world evil seethe and splash out, wandering in history for centuries, and in general in human life.
The word "plague" acquires numerous meanings and turns out to be extremely capacious. The plague is not only a disease, an evil element, a scourge, and not only a war. It is also the cruelty of court sentences, the execution of the vanquished, the fanaticism of the church and the fanaticism of political sects, the death of an innocent child, a society arranged very badly, as well as attempts to rebuild it with arms in hand. It is familiar, natural, like breathing, because "now we are all a little plagued." The plague-trouble for the time being slumbers in a lull, sometimes gives flashes, but never disappears completely.
The chronicle of several months of the Orange epidemic, when half of the population, "dumped into the mouth of an incinerator, flew into the air with greasy sticky smoke, while the other, shackled in the chains of impotence and fear, was waiting for its turn," implies the hostage of the Nazis in France. But the very meeting of Camus's compatriots with the invaders, as well as the meeting of the Orans with a plague monster sprayed in microbes, according to the logic of the book, is a difficult meeting of mankind with its Destiny.
In rethinking the image of the plague, which turned into a gloomy metaphor for world Evil, a remarkable role, and just at the beginning of work on a new edition of the novel, was played by biblical motifs. The first entry in Camus' Notebooks, referring directly to the second version of The Plague, consisted of a number of extracts from the Bible - those places where it comes to God sending a pestilence on people who disobeyed Him. Here is one of these places, expressively depicting the wrath and wrath of God directed at anyone who dares to transgress His covenant: “And I will bring a vengeful sword on you in vengeance for the covenant; but if you take refuge in your cities, I will send a plague on you, and you will be delivered into the hands of the enemy.” The plague, thus, turns out to be in the minds of Camus not only, and even not so much the work of some miserable brown Caligulas, obsessed with the idea of autocratic domination, as the inescapable beginning of being, the unshakable principle of any existence, that Evil, without which there is no Good. But who is responsible for Good and Evil? In 1946, speaking to the monks of the Dominican monastery of La Tour-Mabourg, Camus said: “We are all faced with evil. As for me, in truth, I feel like Augustine before the adoption of Christianity, who said: "I was looking for where evil comes from, and I could not find a way out of this search." Augustine's way out is well-known: good comes from God, a person who has fallen away from God in the fall, chooses evil by his will. “No one is kind,” concludes Augustine. Camus translates the problem of evil into a different plane, the plane of the actual life position of a person who daily encounters real evil. If God, with all his goodness, allows evil as a means of enlightening and punishing a guilty person, how should a person behave? Should he meekly submit, should he fall on his knees with humble obedience when evil threatens his existence, the existence of his loved ones?
In The Plague, the position of humility with Evil, which, according to Camus, is characteristic of the Christian worldview, is presented in the image of Father Paplu. The learned Jesuit, who won fame for his writings on Augustine (an important detail!), delivers an ardent sermon at the end of the first month of the plague. Its main thesis can be expressed in a few words: "My brothers, trouble has befallen us, and you deserve it, brothers." Citing a verse from Exodus about the plague, one of the ten terrible "plagues of Egypt," the preacher adds: "That's when for the first time in history this scourge appeared in order to slay the enemies of God. Pharaoh opposed the plans of the Ancient One, and the plague forced him to kneel. From the very beginning of human history, the scourge of God humbled the hard-headed and the blind. Think it over well and kneel." The plague in Panlu's sermon is interpreted as the "crimson spear" of the Lord, inexorably pointing to salvation: the very scourge that severely strikes people and pushes them into the kingdom of heaven. In the plague, says Panlou, "Divine help and the eternal hope of the Christian" is given. One should love Him with true strength, and "God will complete the rest"
Such, according to Camus, is the ideological position of Christianity, which predetermined the life position of a person who looks to God with hope. As has been repeatedly pointed out, Camus depicts the image of Christianity in his thoughts and writings with excessive cruelty. But behind his categoricalness, which hides the sincere desire of the thinker to understand the inexplicable with the mind, one discerns not a destructive craving for denial, but an inexorable thirst for understanding, an effective need for spiritual dialogue. The dispute between Camus and Christianity was conducted not in the language of "exposure", but in the language of dialogue.
The worldview of Christianity, presented in the first sermon of Father Panlu, also met with conflicting assessments. Thus, J. Herme, the author of an interesting monograph on the connections between Camus's thought and Christianity, remarks about this sermon that "only with great reservations will a Christian agree to recognize" in it the true "evangelical word." However, in a special theological study on the problem of evil in modern times, we come across a completely opposite opinion: “This sermon, no matter how controversial it may seem, is very plausible in the mouth of a priest of the 30s, when it was delivered.” Indeed, the real history of Europe at the end The 30s - early 40s could well provide Camus with examples of Christian resignation before the unstoppable onslaught of evil. According to R. Kiyo, Camus told him that, while working on the chapter on Panlu's sermon, he kept in mind "some messages of the bishops and cardinals of 1940, calling in the spirit of the Vichy regime to total repentance." History, as we can see, was closely intertwined in the minds of Camus with God: two unshakable Absolutes threatened man and life. One - by real destruction, the other - by the demand for obedience. God and History turned out to be in his mind two inexhaustible sources of Evil, which now and then merge into a single destructive stream: “There is the death of a child, which means divine arbitrariness, and there is the death of a child, which means human arbitrariness. We are sandwiched between them." It remains for a person to either reconcile himself to arbitrariness - thus becoming involved in Evil, or to deny arbitrariness, both divine and historical, actively resisting it and thereby asserting his innocence. Camus again justifies man: evil is not in man, and man is obliged and called upon to fight evil. Man, by virtue of his humanity, is doomed to rebellion.
Having firmly connected the image of the plague with the image of evil, the novelist during 1943-1944 carefully clarifies the poles of the main ideological conflict of the work. "One of the possible themes," he writes in January 1943, "is the struggle between medicine and religion...". At the end of the year, the writer sharpens the opposition of rebellion and humility even more: “Medicine and religion: these are two trades, and they seem to be able to reconcile with each other. But right now, when everything is crystal clear, it becomes obvious that they are irreconcilable.” A little later, sketching out the features of the image of Dr. Rieux, designed to express a worldview that is opposite to the religious one, the novelist clearly formulates the deep meaning of this opposition: “The doctor is the enemy of God: he fights death ... his craft is to be the enemy of God ".
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Introduction
The history of the creation of the novel "The Plague"
2. "The Plague" as a novel about the absurd
The symbolic image of the plague in the novel
Conclusion
Literature
Introduction
From ancient times, the culture of France was generous with "moralists" - writers of a special warehouse, who successfully labored in the borderlands of philosophy and literature as such. Actually, the French moraliste, judging by the explanatory dictionaries, is only one of its meanings, and by no means the first, coincides with the Russian "moralist" - an instructive moralist, a preacher of virtue. First of all, this word just implies a combination in one person of a master of the pen and a thinker who discusses in his books the mysteries of human nature with witty frankness, like Montaigne in the 16th, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld in the 17th, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau in the 18th centuries.
France of the 20th century put forward another constellation of such moralists: Saint-Exupery, Malraux, Sartre... Among the first among these big names, Albert Camus should rightly be named. When he died in a road accident in the winter of 1960, Sartre, with whom they were at first close, and then sharply diverged, in a farewell note about Camus, outlined his appearance and place in spiritual life in the West in the following way: “Camus represented in our century - and in a dispute against current history - today's heir to an old breed of those moralists whose work is probably the most original line in French literature. His stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, stern and sensual, waged a doubtful battle against the crushing and ugly trends of the era. And yet, by the stubbornness of his "no" he - in spite of the Machiavellians, in spite of the golden calf of business - strengthened the moral foundations in her heart. For the sake of accuracy, it is only necessary to stipulate that what Sartre said then rightly applies to Camus of mature years. Camus, what he was not always, but what he became, in the end, having come very, very far away - completely from other starting points.
1. The history of the creation of the novel "Plague"
“From the point of view of new classicism,” writes Camus shortly before finishing work on the novel about the plague, as if trying to hold together the aesthetic and philosophical concepts of the work, “Plague can perhaps be considered the first attempt to depict collective passion.” Work on this work, which began in 1938, but proceeded especially intensively immediately after the completion of The Myth of Sisyphus (February 1941), was completed at the turn of 1946-1947, and the novelist, acutely experiencing the difficulties of creating a novel, almost did not refused to publish it. In the autumn of 1946, a characteristic entry appeared in the Notebooks, reflecting the writer's deep doubts and his vague premonition of creative success: “The Plague. Never in my life have I experienced such a sense of failure. I'm not even sure I'll make it to the end. And yet sometimes...
Work on The Plague progressed extremely difficult and slowly. The work absorbed the fruits of serious changes in the writer's ideological position, predetermined by the tragic events of European history in 1939-1945, it reflected the intense aesthetic searches of the novelist, which, as we saw in the previous section, are closely connected with the internal logic of the development of his philosophical thought. The creative history of The Plague, a novel that was widely perceived as a chronicle of "European resistance to Nazism", let's add - and to any totalitarianism, is a kind of chronicle of the spiritual evolution of its author.
The first notes on the novel date back to 1938, when, after the failure of The Happy Death, the writer is completely immersed in the development of new ideas. The Notebooks contains an extended prose sketch of the difficult love of two young poor people. In a world of poverty and exhausting work, in a world of deprivation and suffering, where "there is no place for love", love, despite all the absurdity of existence, is able to firmly unite two people in the "enchanted desert" of happiness, "which a person experiences when he sees that life justifies him expectations." In The Plague, this fragment will almost without change enter the touching confession of Joseph Grand, a modest city hall official, courageously fulfilling his duty in the common fight against a destructive epidemic, and in his short hours of leisure struggling over the first phrase of the novel, which should justify him in the eyes of Jeanne, who left her husband because he "failed to support her in the belief that she was loved." Love, thus, initially becomes the antipode of the plague, its effective power strengthens the will of man to resist evil.
September 1939 plunges Europe into the cold twilight of a terrible war that took many by surprise - like a genuine natural disaster. Camus wants to volunteer, but the military medical commission recognizes him as unfit for service. A somewhat romanized response to this examination appears in Notebooks: “But this little one is very sick,” said the lieutenant. We can't take him... A series of Camus' diary reflections relating to the alarming autumn of 1939 testifies that the absurdity of human existence, which until now had a predominantly metaphysical dimension in the mind of the writer, began to take on distinct social contours. The war visibly embodied the absurdity of history: “War broke out. Where is the war? Where, besides news bulletins that you have to believe, and posters that you have to read, can you look for manifestations of this absurd event? .. People tend to believe in it. They are looking for her face, but she is hiding from us. Life with its magnificent faces reigns around. Already on September 7, the feeling of the suddenness of the onset of disaster is supplemented by the first timid attempts to find the true motives for the absurdity of history, and even then the social factors of the catastrophe that broke out were not thought of by the young writer in isolation from personal responsibility: “People all wanted to understand where the war is - and what is vile in it. And now they notice that they know where she is, that she is in themselves, that she is in this awkwardness, in this need to choose, which makes them go to the front and at the same time torment that they did not have the courage to stay at home, or to stay at home and at the same time to be tormented that they did not go to death along with others. Here she is, she is here, and we were looking for her in the blue sky and in the indifference of the surrounding world. She is in the terrible loneliness of the one who fights, and the one who remains in the rear, in the shameful despair that has seized everyone, and in the moral decline that eventually appears on the faces. The kingdom of beasts has arrived." Awareness of personal responsibility in these reflections of Camus is accompanied by the experience of determining the vocation of a person and an artist in the difficult years of the reign of evil: “The desire to fence off - whether from stupidity, from the cruelty of his African “origin” Oran becomes for Camus an image of a European city.
2. "The Plague" as a novel about the absurd
In Oran, the writer encounters vivid images of the futility of human existence. The first Orange recording in 1941 was a sketch of an “old cat-spitting man” throwing scraps of paper from a second-story window to attract cats: “Then he spits on them. When the spit hits one of the cats, the old man laughs.”
In April 1941, the image of the plague appears for the first time in the Notebooks: "The Plague, or Incident (novel)". Immediately after this entry, there is a detailed plan of the work under the heading “Plague Deliverer”, which outlines a number of leading images, themes, plot moves of the novel: “Happy city. People live in their own way. The plague puts everyone on the same level. And all the same, everyone dies ... The philosopher writes there "an anthology of insignificant deeds." Keeps, in this light, a diary of the plague. (Another diary - in a pathetic light. A teacher of Greek and Latin ...) ... Black pus oozing from ulcers kills faith in a young priest ... However, there is a gentleman who does not part with his habits ... He dies, looking at ease, in full dress ... One man sees traces of the plague on the face of his beloved ... He fights with himself. On top of all the same, the body wins. He is disgusted. He grabs her arm... drags her... down the main street. He throws her into the gutter ... Finally, the most insignificant character takes the floor. "In a way," he says, "it's the scourge of God."
As we have already said, this fragment refers to April 1941 - more than five years remained before the complete completion of work on the novel. It is impossible not to notice that in the main structural moments the original concept of the novel, even having undergone significant semantic and aesthetic changes, remained unchanged.
An Anthology of Insignificant Deeds will be included in the diaries of Jean Tarrou, included by Dr. Bernard Rieux in his chronicle of the plague. The image of the Greek and Latin teacher Stephen, keeping a "pathetic diary" of the disaster, will disappear, apparently due to the overly personal nature of the experiences that tormented him. His place will be taken by the image of the journalist Rambert, who feels like an “outsider” in a plagued city. The image of a young priest who loses faith during the plague will find its final embodiment in the image of Father Panlu, a learned Jesuit, explaining to the people of Oran in his sermons the meaning of the calamity sent down on them (“the scourge of God”). The gentleman who does not part with his habits is the investigator Otho, whose unshakable stiffness will change, however, with the death of his son. The insane impulse of a man who throws his beloved into the gutter, seized with a fatal illness, will be reflected in the image of Cottard, a man with a dark past, whom the plague freed from police persecution: with the end of the epidemic, he will begin to shoot innocent people.
In the April draft, the basis of the first edition of The Plague, of particular interest is the obvious equivalence of the positions and situations conceived by the writer. Trying to establish the continuity of the new novel with the novel about the absurd, Camus notes in Notebooks: “The Outsider describes the nakedness of a person in the face of the absurd. "Plague" is a deep equality of points of view of individuals in the face of the same absurdity. To fight or not to fight the plague - such a question does not yet arise before the heroes of the novel. You can devote yourself to compiling an “anthology of insignificant deeds”, you can, like Stephen, rethink Thucydides’ History while thinking with a distant beloved, you can finally, having forgotten all the norms of humanity, throw a plague-stricken wife into a ditch. An absurd plague equalizes everyone and everything with inevitable death. The equivalence of the individual positions taken by the inhabitants of the city engulfed by the epidemic, predetermined, in our opinion, by the moral indifference of the philosophical concept of absurdity, which has not yet been completely overcome, was emphasized in the original edition of The Plague by a schematic composition. As R. Kiyo, who specifically compared the two editions of the work, notes, in the first “Rieux’s notes, Tarru’s notebooks and Stefan’s diary, just Tarru’s books and Stefan’s diary are simply opposed to each other and united only by the image of the narrator, behind which the author was easily guessed.”
The first edition of the novel was completed in January 1943. At the request of J. Paulan, who had read Camus's manuscript, an excerpt from it entitled "The Hermits of the Plague" (one of the variants of the first chapter of the second part of the novel) was submitted for publication to the well-known publisher J. Lescure, who planned to revive the freedom-loving traditions of the Nouvel Revue Francaise in terms of the occupation. The intelligentsia, which opposed the Nazi regime, hatched plans to create a kind of "Anti-Nouvel Revue Française." The solid anthology The French Destiny, collected by J. Lescure and published in the summer of 1943 in Switzerland, was one of the first serious evidence of the intellectual opposition of French writers. In the preface written by Lescure, it was noted: "For months now it seemed that every voice of France was doomed to silence." However, many realized that they should raise their voices, and this anthology, continued J. Lescure, unites the commonwealth of writers that arose "around freedom and man." In fact, the collection "The French Destiny" brought together writers of various trends and beliefs under its cover: L. Aragon and P. Valery, P. Eluard and R. Quepo, J.-P. Sartre and F. Mauriac, P. Claudel and A. Camus. They were united by concern for the fate of France and the belief in the need to revive the trampled dignity of man.
The fragment "The Hermits of the Plague" was devoted to the theme of separation, very consonant with the experiences of many French people who, at the behest of the invaders, found themselves far from their loved ones. It is important, according to Camus, that such an intimate feeling as separation from a loved one has become a universal experience. The plague in his work, like the ongoing war, united people in suffering. The finished version of The Plague did not satisfy Camus. Apparently, he was not satisfied with the absurd equivalence of the depicted life positions, which clearly did not correspond to the ideas of rebellion that were growing stronger in his mind. In the first edition of the novel, even in the very title - "The Plague - the Liberator", nihilistic motives of the philosophy of the absurd prevailed. This is also indicated by one of the first literary sources of The Plague, which, according to many researchers, decisively influenced the design of Camus' creative concept. We are talking about the literary and aesthetic essay "The Theater and the Plague", which appeared in October 1934 on the pages of the "Nouvelle Revue Française". Its author was Aptonin Artaud (1895-1948), a poet, actor, playwright and theorist of the "theater of cruelty", who dreamed in line with surrealist aspirations of the complete liberation of the "I", crushed by generally accepted norms and obsessive automatisms.
Artaud, reflecting on the need to harmonize human actions and thoughts, assigns a special role to the theater in purifying a person from everything inauthentic. According to his ideas, culture has an impact on people with original force, exalted power, contributing to the return of the natural cruelty of man. The theater was created in order to revive the original nature of man, to return to him his suppressed desires. “The impact of the theatre,” Artaud wrote, “like the impact of the plague, is beneficial, for by forcing people to see themselves as they really are, the theater and the plague tear off their masks, reveal lies, lethargy, baseness, hypocrisy; theater and plague shake the suffocating inertness of matter, affecting the most obvious data of feelings, revealing to human collectives their hidden power, theater and plague make them occupy higher and heroic positions in relation to fate, which would never have been without them. For Artaud, the plague is truly a liberator, because it helps to gain the desired freedom, it destroys the boundaries of morality, pushes the boundaries of what is permitted, and liberates the inner energy of the individual.
Camus, who turned to drama just at the beginning of the 30s and constantly followed the publications of the Nouvelle Revue Fraksez, could not help but know the aesthetic ideas of Artaud. His play Caligula, especially in the 1938 edition, is very close to the aesthetics of the Theater of Cruelty. Moreover, in the words of the emperor, who embarked on the path of testing unlimited freedom, one can hear a direct echo of Artaud’s thoughts about the “educational” role of the plague: “My reign has so far been too happy. No epidemic plague, no inhuman religion, not even a coup d'état, in short, nothing that can keep you in the memory of posterity. So, this is partly why I am trying to compensate for the caution of fate ... In a word, I am a substitute for the plague. The plague, a destructive and instructive disaster, becomes the gloomy hypostasis of Caligula, obsessed with supreme self-will. Its absurd inevitability is for people a kind of unconditional refutation of life in carelessness.
In the final version of The Plague, the "liberating" role of the absurd calamity is hardly visible. Absolute permissiveness, as a possible consequence of the complete hopelessness of the prisoners of the plague, looms somewhere in the background with a formidable warning: “If the epidemic spreads in breadth, then the boundaries of morality, perhaps, will move further apart. And then we will see the Milanese saturnalia at the open graves.
However, the main flaw in the first edition of the novel was not so much in the predominance of the motives of the absurd as in the absence of ideas of rebellion against it. It is no coincidence, therefore, that already in one of the first drafts for the second version of the novel, a characteristic entry appears: "More social criticism and rebellion." In September 1943, the morality of active resistance to evil, firmly entrenched in the mind of the writer, begins to dominate in the notes to the novel: “The Plague. Everyone is fighting - each in his own way. Cowardice is only in getting on your knees. A person is obliged not to reconcile himself with evil - this conclusion becomes more and more obvious for Camus.
3. The symbolic image of the plague in the novel
philosophical novel camus plague
Simultaneously with the start of work on the second version of the work (January 1943), a deep rethinking of the very image of the plague takes place. If at first he had the vague features of an inexplicable disaster, combined in the mind of the writer with the onset of war, now the novelist seeks to present Evil in him, that is, a certain necessity of the existing world order. At the same time, the anti-Christian orientation of his thought predetermined the acuteness of the eternal problem of theodicy - how to reconcile the existence of Evil with the goodness, wisdom, omnipotence and justice of God - which turned out to be at the center of the worldview conflict of the novel.
The storm of ancient and medieval cities, the plague in the 20th century, seems to have been eradicated. Meanwhile, the chronicle dated quite accurately - 194 ... year. The date is immediately alarming: then the word "plague" was on everyone's lips - "brown plague". A little further on, the casual remark that the plague, like war, has always taken people by surprise, strengthens the flashed guess. The plague is a metaphor already fixed in everyday usage. Why, however, did Camus need to resort instead to the historical hints of an allegorical parable? While working on The Plague, he wrote in his diary: “With the help of the plague, I want to convey the atmosphere of suffocation from which we suffered, the atmosphere of danger and exile in which we lived then. At the same time, I want to extend this interpretation to existence in general. The catastrophe that shook France, in the eyes of Camus, was a catalyst that made the world evil seethe and splash out, wandering in history for centuries, and in general in human life.
The word "plague" acquires numerous meanings and turns out to be extremely capacious. The plague is not only a disease, an evil element, a scourge, and not only a war. It is also the cruelty of court sentences, the execution of the vanquished, the fanaticism of the church and the fanaticism of political sects, the death of an innocent child, a society arranged very badly, as well as attempts to rebuild it with arms in hand. It is familiar, natural, like breathing, because "now we are all a little plagued." The plague-trouble for the time being slumbers in a lull, sometimes gives flashes, but never disappears completely.
The chronicle of several months of the Orange epidemic, when half of the population, "dumped into the mouth of an incinerator, flew into the air with greasy sticky smoke, while the other, shackled in the chains of impotence and fear, was waiting for its turn," implies the hostage of the Nazis in France. But the very meeting of Camus's compatriots with the invaders, as well as the meeting of the Orans with a plague monster sprayed in microbes, according to the logic of the book, is a difficult meeting of mankind with its Destiny.
In rethinking the image of the plague, which turned into a gloomy metaphor for world Evil, a remarkable role, and just at the beginning of work on a new edition of the novel, was played by biblical motifs. The first entry in Camus' Notebooks, referring directly to the second version of The Plague, consisted of a number of extracts from the Bible - those places where it comes to God sending a pestilence on people who disobeyed Him. Here is one of these places, expressively depicting the wrath and wrath of God directed at anyone who dares to transgress His covenant: “And I will bring a vengeful sword on you in vengeance for the covenant; but if you take refuge in your cities, I will send a plague on you, and you will be delivered into the hands of the enemy.” The plague, thus, turns out to be in the minds of Camus not only, and even not so much the work of some miserable brown Caligulas, obsessed with the idea of autocratic domination, as the inescapable beginning of being, the unshakable principle of any existence, that Evil, without which there is no Good. But who is responsible for Good and Evil? In 1946, speaking to the monks of the Dominican monastery of La Tour-Mabourg, Camus said: “We are all faced with evil. As for me, in truth, I feel like Augustine before the adoption of Christianity, who said: "I was looking for where evil comes from, and I could not find a way out of this search." Augustine's way out is well-known: good comes from God, a person who has fallen away from God in the fall, chooses evil by his will. “No one is kind,” Augustine concludes. Camus translates the problem of evil into a different plane, the plane of the actual life position of a person who daily encounters real evil. If God, with all his goodness, allows evil as a means of enlightening and punishing a guilty person, how should a person behave? Should he meekly submit, should he fall on his knees with humble obedience when evil threatens his existence, the existence of his loved ones?
In The Plague, the position of humility with Evil, which, according to Camus, is characteristic of the Christian worldview, is presented in the image of Father Paplu. The learned Jesuit, who won fame for his writings on Augustine (an important detail!), delivers an ardent sermon at the end of the first month of the plague. Its main thesis can be expressed in a few words: "My brothers, trouble has befallen us, and you deserve it, brothers." Citing a verse from Exodus about the plague, one of the ten terrible "plagues of Egypt," the preacher adds: "That's when for the first time in history this scourge appeared in order to slay the enemies of God. Pharaoh opposed the plans of the Ancient One, and the plague forced him to kneel. From the very beginning of human history, the scourge of God humbled the hard-headed and the blind. Think it over well and kneel." The plague in Panlu's sermon is interpreted as the "crimson spear" of the Lord, inexorably pointing to salvation: the very scourge that severely strikes people and pushes them into the kingdom of heaven. In the plague, says Panlou, "Divine help and the eternal hope of the Christian" is given. One should love Him with true strength, and "God will complete the rest"
Such, according to Camus, is the ideological position of Christianity, which predetermined the life position of a person who looks to God with hope. As has been repeatedly pointed out, Camus depicts the image of Christianity in his thoughts and writings with excessive cruelty. But behind his categoricalness, which hides the sincere desire of the thinker to understand the inexplicable with the mind, one discerns not a destructive craving for denial, but an inexorable thirst for understanding, an effective need for spiritual dialogue. The dispute between Camus and Christianity was conducted not in the language of "exposure", but in the language of dialogue.
The worldview of Christianity, presented in the first sermon of Father Panlu, also met with conflicting assessments. Thus, J. Herme, the author of an interesting monograph on the connections between Camus's thought and Christianity, remarks about this sermon that "only with great reservations will a Christian agree to recognize" in it the true "evangelical word." However, in a special theological study on the problem of evil in modern times, we come across a completely opposite opinion: “This sermon, no matter how controversial it may seem, is very plausible in the mouth of a priest of the 30s, when it was delivered.” Indeed, the real history of Europe at the end The 30s - early 40s could well provide Camus with examples of Christian resignation before the unstoppable onslaught of evil. According to R. Kiyo, Camus told him that, while working on the chapter on Panlu's sermon, he kept in mind "some messages of the bishops and cardinals of 1940, calling in the spirit of the Vichy regime to total repentance." History, as we can see, was closely intertwined in the minds of Camus with God: two unshakable Absolutes threatened man and life. One - real destruction, the other - the demand for obedience. God and History turned out to be in his mind two inexhaustible sources of Evil, which now and then merge into a single destructive stream: “There is the death of a child, which means divine arbitrariness, and there is the death of a child, which means human arbitrariness. We are sandwiched between them." It remains for a person to either reconcile himself to arbitrariness - thus becoming involved in Evil, or to deny arbitrariness, both divine and historical, actively resisting it and thereby asserting his innocence. Camus again justifies man: evil is not in man, and man is obliged and called upon to fight evil. Man, by virtue of his humanity, is doomed to rebellion.
Having firmly connected the image of the plague with the image of evil, the novelist during 1943-1944 carefully clarifies the poles of the main ideological conflict of the work. "One of the possible themes," he writes in January 1943, "is the struggle between medicine and religion...". At the end of the year, the writer sharpens the opposition of rebellion and humility even more: “Medicine and religion: these are two trades, and they seem to be able to reconcile with each other. But right now, when everything is crystal clear, it becomes obvious that they are irreconcilable.” A little later, sketching out the features of the image of Dr. Rieux, designed to express a worldview that is opposite to the religious one, the novelist clearly formulates the deep meaning of this opposition: “The doctor is the enemy of God: he fights death ... his craft is to be the enemy of God” .
Conclusion
"Plague" is "chronicle". This means that something has appeared in reality that should be communicated in the exact language of a chronicler, which means that reality has become instructive, it has pushed aside the usual theoretical calculations, which quite recently obscured the lessons that life taught. The hero of The Plague, Bernard Rieux, prefers to talk about "us", to say "we", not "I": Rieux feels his involvement in the fate of other people, Rieux is not an outsider, he is "local". In addition, he is a "local doctor" - and who else can reliably tell about the plague epidemic? The doctor is social by the nature of his occupation: it is impossible to imagine a doctor who "withdrew" from people. Riyo hastily warns the reader that he will try to be precise, for which he refers to "documents", to "evidence". In The Plague, instead of "individual destinies", "collective history" is depicted, history.
Once again, death is a "reference point", but death that has become a plague. You can add - "brown plague", fascism. She forces the heroes to make their choice. The Plague's character system is an illustration of the various solutions to this problem: here are Cottard, an immoralist who has degenerated into a petty crook, and the journalist Rambert, another "outsider" whose removal is like a desertion, and an inhabitant of the "ivory tower" Grand, who felt in time that the "towers" were collapsing, and the churchman Panslu. But Riyo prefers to treat his neighbor, and not to sing the bliss of suffering. For Riyo, "the sky is empty", there is only the earth.
However, the hero hardly chooses, he just continues his work, continues to heal. Riyo is a practitioner, "attending physician". This is his strength, this is his weakness. He and others like him are not heroes, but "orderlies". They have no ideas, no taste for heroism. Moreover, heroism, ideas, ideals, claims to rebuild the world - all this seems to the "orderlies" of Albert Camus something dangerous, a kind of ideological obsession with Caligula. Ideas in Camus's work are dismissed like the plague. The true essence of being remains for Camus the incurability of evil. The plague is not only a symbolic image of war and fascism, it is another personification of the absurd, which, according to Camus, is the basis of existence. That's why although Riyo still heals, he does not expect victory, his heavy burden will roll down as soon as Riyo reaches the top.
In The Rebellious Man, Camus wrote that "absolute denial" leads to permissiveness, to crime, to murder. Camus cannot accept it, cannot accept the encroachment on the life of another person. But even more unacceptable for him is the "historical rebellion", i.e. social revolution: "a rebel is a person who says no." The political position of Camus turns out to be ambiguous, which Sartre condemned.
The artist cannot do without reality, Camus argued. He condemned "pure art" ("the time of irresponsible artists is over"). But his understanding of responsibility in the 1950s was still nourished by the hope of transcending the absurd by naming it, portraying it. Camus's position prompted the search for eternal and absolute principles that could be identified with the concept of freedom. So Camus again turns to nature, to the sea, to the sun. He tries to connect the heavy need to live in the real world with the need for absolute freedom.
In 1945, in the collection "Existence", which was being prepared for publication by the teacher Camus J. Grenier, his "Note on the Rebellion" appeared. Paradoxically, this note, probably due to the catchy title of the collection, which became one of the first swallows of the existentialist craze, contributed to the establishment of ideas about Camus as an "existentialist". The paradox was that it was in this philosophical work that Camus implicitly and sometimes openly criticized existentialism as a philosophical doctrine. In the "Note on the Revolt" Camus thought made the first, but decisive step from the level of "existence", that is, absolutely independent individual existence, on the basis of which the reflection of the "Myth of Sisyphus" was based, to the soil of being, to the understanding of man as an integral part of the cosmos. This work was the initial outline of the philosophy of rebellion, deployed in The Rebel Man, it also turned out to be a kind of philosophical commentary on the morality of rebellion, revealed in the novel The Plague.
Literature
- Fokin S. Albert Camus. Novel. Philosophy. Life. - St. Petersburg: Aletheya, 1999.
- Kushkin E.P. Albert Camus. Early years. - L .: Publishing house Leningrad. un-ta, 1982. - 183 p.
- Mounier E. Hope of the desperate: Melro, Camus, Bernanos. - M.: Art, 1995. - 238 p.
- Kossan E. Existentialism in Philosophy and Literature // Per. from Polish. E.Ya. Hesse. - M.: Politizdat, 1980. - 360 p.
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Composition
Camus' play "Caligula" is devoted to the problem of metaphysical rebellion. The direct historical source of the plot is the work of a Roman historian and writer of the 1st century BC. Suetonius, On the Life of the Twelve Caesars. Camus read Suetonius' Caligula. He was fascinated by this person. He constantly talked about him. In the process of artistic processing of historical material, Camus refuses a concrete historical analysis and considers the protagonist as the bearer of a metaphysical rebellion, and his tragedy as the tragedy of "supreme suicide".
In 1958, in the preface to the American edition of the collection of plays, Camus wrote: “Caligula is a story of supreme suicide. A story that is supremely tragic and humane. Out of loyalty to himself, unfaithful to his neighbors, Caligula agrees to die, realizing that no one can be saved alone and that one cannot be free against other people. Having lost his beloved woman, the young emperor realizes a simple truth: "People die and they are unhappy." Caligula is annoyed by the soothing lies that surround him. He wants to "live in truth." The emperor wants to change the existing order of being. His power and freedom are unlimited.
Comprehension of the absurdity of life makes the kind and contemplative Caligula a cruel tyrant who kills his subjects. At the end of the play, Caligula is defeated. He realizes that he is wrong and therefore dooms himself to death. Aware of the impending conspiracy, he does nothing to prevent it. “If the truth of Caligula is in his rebellion, then his mistake is in the denial of people. You can’t destroy everything without destroying yourself,” Camus later wrote. The second period of Camus's work is completed by his philosophical work "The Rebellious Man" ("L'homme révolté", 1951), in which the writer traces the history of the idea of rebellion.
The writer consistently considers "metaphysical", "historical" rebellion, "rebellion and art". The starting point of his philosophy is the absurdity and the resulting revolt. However, in The Rebellious Man, a slightly different interpretation of rebellion is given. Rebellion is no longer just a “refusal of reconciliation”, but a demand for human solidarity, recognition of the value of the “other”. “In rebellion, a person is reunited with other people, and from this point of view, human solidarity is metaphysical,” wrote Camus. Thus, in "The Rebellious Man" "the individual value of a person acquires a universal meaning and meaning."
The novel The Plague (1947) is written in the chronicle genre, a plague year in the small provincial town of Oran on the Mediterranean coast. The narrative manner in The Plague is oriented towards the reliability of documentary evidence, the scrupulousness and accuracy of the protocol record. At the center of the novel is not the fate of the individual, but the tragedy of society. this is not a clash of separate personalities, but a meeting of mankind with an impersonal and terrible plague, some absolute evil. Absurdity ceases to be elusive, it has acquired an image that can and must be accurately recreated, studied by a scientist, a historian. The plague is an allegorical image, but its most obvious meaning is deciphered without any difficulty: fascism, war, occupation.
Bernard Rieux, unlike Meursault, prefers to speak of "we" rather than "I", prefers to speak of "us". Rieux is not a "stranger", he is a "local", moreover, he is a "local doctor" - it is impossible to imagine a doctor who withdraws from people. Man's behavior is no longer determined by an omnipotent absurdity, but by a choice about a specific task that matters and evaluates everyone. The Plague has many characters, many choices. There is also an “outsider”, the journalist Rambert, who is not from “these places”, and is trying to eliminate himself. There is an "immoralist" here who has degenerated into a petty swindler. There is an inhabitant of the "ivory tower", obsessed with Flaubert's "torments of the word." There is also a priest, but faith does not return to the land infected with the plague. The positive is affirmed in The Plague not as truth, not as an ideal, but as the fulfillment of an elementary duty, as work, the necessity of which is dictated by a mortal threat. Thou shalt not kill - such is the moral basis of the activity of "doctors".
The profession of a doctor allows the hero of the novel to do without ideas, just do the usual thing, without racking his brains over complex issues, without clogging it with ideology that scares away Camus' "orderlies". The plague is not only an allegorical image of fascism. Camus retains, along with the social, the metaphysical meaning of the metaphor. The heroes of the novel-practice, "doctors" also because the disease is incurable, the disease struck the very existence, which is incurably absurd. The doctors could not cope with the disease, she left herself - to return.
That is why in the guise of Rie it is not difficult to see the features of Sisyphus. Like Sisyphus, Rieux does not expect victory, he is given only the knowledge of trouble and the opportunity to assert his dignity, his humanity in a hopeless battle with death. The first outlines of the plot of The Plague and the publication of the finished book are separated by almost ten years: individual characters that we find in the story appear in Camus' notebooks as early as 1938. Undoubtedly, one of the events that most directly determined the course of work on the book , the war began: almost literal references are scattered throughout the book.
A variant title of "Plague or Adventure (novel)", marks Camus in notebooks. The following year, Camus significantly increases the number of clearly defined characters (for example, Cottar and the old asthmatic appear). The first drafts of the whole manuscript differ significantly from the final version; so, for example, the order of chapters and individual descriptions is changed, the characters of Rambert and Grand are missing.
The novel The Plague by Albert Camus, along with his The Outsider and Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, is one of the key works of existentialism. Currents, which received such distribution in the middle of the 20th century.
And there is a reason: the Second World War, as a result, the sharp development of science and technology, the loss of one individual person. "The Plague" describes the events of the plague year in the Algerian city of Oran. The story is told from the perspective of Dr. Rieux, who, together with his comrades, valiantly fights the epidemic. Rieux knows that even if the plague recedes, the trace that it leaves in people will remain forever, it will become a kind of “internal plague”.
Images of the novel "Plague"
First of all, the plague is, of course, allegory of fascism, which captured Europe and left behind such sad consequences. But this level of understanding of Camus's novel is the most superficial. Here you need to dig deeper. To do this, consider the main philosophical provisions of Albert Camus. So, for example, in the essay "The Rebellious Man" Camus says that man cut off from the world. The problem is not that the world is wrong, or that man is a mistake. The problem is that there is no common ground between man and the world. Here Camus continues the line of such outstanding writers of the early 20th century as Franz Kafka and Andrei Platonov. Man is initially thrown into the world without any meaning. "Dead man on vacation" - this is how Camus himself defined the concept of "man". Thus, the plague is that initial gap between man and the world, which is not possible to overcome.
All that a person can do is worthily try to overcome this gap, realizing that this is impossible. Exactly like this, Rieux fights the disease in the plague-ridden Oran. Here we can't help but remember the figure of Sisyphus, an ancient Greek mythological character condemned by the gods to eternal punishment. Sisyphus must roll a huge boulder to the top of the mountain, from where this stone will have to roll down, after which the procedure is repeated. And so forever. Exactly from here in the Russian language the concept of "Sisyphean labor." But if in everyday language it has a negative status, since it does not imply any obvious economic meaning, then for Albert Camus "Sisyphean labor" is the only occupation worthy of a person. Because everything else, in Pascal's terms, is just "entertainment".
Only after removing the blinkers of the social, religious and ethical, and accepting this gaping cleft of being in all its inevitability, only then, according to Camus, does a person make any attempts to be. Camus himself lived this way. At least he tried, for it is as difficult to do so as it is difficult for Sisyphus to push a boulder to the top of a mountain. Camus argued that only the awareness of mortality gives human life any meaning. And those of us who are confident in the immortality of our soul (or body) are not able to accept every single day, since they have an infinite number of such days. In this sense, Albert Camus was an optimist.
Contrary to the misconception, humanity never defeated the plague. Every year, more than 2,000 people fall ill with this terrible disease, and many of them die. In different eras, many dedicated their works to this scourge. Among them is Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus. "The Plague" (a brief summary of the novel is given in Section VI) is an amazing work. In it, the writer not only realistically depicted the life of a city engulfed by an epidemic, but also drew an analogy between the plague and fascism.
Albert Camus, author of The Plague
The writer was born in the autumn of 1913 in Algeria. With the outbreak of the First World War, the boy's father died, and the care of the family fell on the mother's shoulders.
When Albert grew up, he received a scholarship at the local lyceum, and after graduation he continued his studies at the University of Orange.
With in Europe, Camus began to actively fight him. He wrote articles for the independent press in which he criticized the "brown plague".
In the early 1940s, the writer moved to France, where he collaborated with the Resistance Movement. It is noteworthy that, unlike the USSR, in which the fight against fascism was the only way for people to survive, in France the Nazis behaved more tolerantly, and many French supported them. Participation in the Resistance was tantamount to signing a death warrant on oneself, and not many French people risked their well-being and joined it.
During these years, Camus published articles in underground publications that criticized the doctrines of fascism. Later, memories of this period of life will form the basis of Albert Camus's novel The Plague, a summary of which is the topic of our conversation today.
Over time, the writer forms his own philosophy, close to the ideas of existentialism (the irrationality of existence). During this period, the writer's story "The Outsider" and the philosophical essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" were published.
In 1943, Camus began work on the parable novel The Plague. However, it is possible to complete and publish it only after 4 years.
In subsequent years, Camus reconsiders his views and writes the essay "The Rebellious Man", because of which many like-minded people begin to treat him negatively, but Camus's books are popular, and in 1957 the writer receives the Nobel Prize.
This man's life was cut short in January 1960 when he was in a car accident. Albert Camus was buried at the Lourmarin cemetery in southern France.
Background of the novel
The idea to write a novel about fascism came to Camus in the early 40s, when he taught at Oran. However, work on the novel began only in 1943, Albert Camus.
The Plague (a summary of the chapters will be discussed later) was completed only in 1947 and published in the same year. Europe, which had not yet had time to recover from the war, perfectly accepted the novel-parable, as they still remembered the invasion of the “brown plague”.
Composition of the novel by chapter
The language of the work is rather dry and devoid of emotions, because this is a chronicle novel, consisting of the notes of Dr. Bernard Rieux and Jean Tarrou, who arrived shortly before the start of the epidemic.
In total, the novel consists of 5 chapters, each of which illustrates a certain emotional state of people in relation to the plague:
Chapter I - "Negation".
Chapter II - "Anger".
Chapter III - "Permissiveness".
Chapter IV - "Depression and fatigue."
Chapter V - "Humility".
The main characters of the novel
It is worth first considering the main characters of the novel before starting a brief retelling of the content.
Plague (Camus Albert emphasized this) is the main character of the work.
It is omnipresent and inexorable, meaningless and merciless - absolute evil. Most of the other characters are heroes fighting her. So, their leader can be called Dr. Bernard Rieux. This is a swarthy, dark-haired and brown-eyed man of 35 years old. The doctor tries to keep all his experiences to himself. He suffers from separation from his wife, but he does not complain and does not attempt to escape from the city, and day after day, despite his fatigue, he continues to treat the sick. His credo: Gotta be crazy, blind or scoundrel, to put up with With plague».
The opposite of the doctor is a young journalist from Paris, Raymond Rambert. Despite a lot of experiences (he fought in Spain), the reporter remains a very emotional person. Accidentally finding himself in a plague-ridden city, he tries to get out of it in order to return to his beloved wife.
At first, he behaves as if everything that happens around him does not concern him. But soon he changes his attitude and, having got a chance to escape, remains in the city and selflessly fights the plague. This character was not included in the original drafts for the novel.
Another bright character is Jean Tarrou. From childhood he grew up in prosperity, but, realizing that others live worse, he decided to devote his life to helping them. After a while, Tarrou discovers that he often made things worse in his attempts to help. Despite bitter disappointment, with the advent of the plague, Tarru leaves his philosophizing and organizes the first volunteer medical squad to help fight the infection. Ultimately, this hero dies from the plague in anticipation of defeating it.
Panlu's father. This image embodies all the nuances of the Christian worldview. At first, he interprets the epidemic as the Lord's of the inhabitants of the city. However, over time, it turns out that both innocent children and old sinners die from the infection. Despite this, the priest does not lose his faith and accepts what is happening with humility. He becomes an assistant to the atheist Rieux and takes care of the sick, sparing no effort. Having fallen ill, the priest refuses treatment and accepts death with a crucifix in his hands.
Minor Heroes
Having become acquainted with the main and secondary characters of Camus's novel ("The Plague"), the summary of the work will be easier to understand.
Small freelance worker of the mayor's office, 50-year-old Joseph Grand does not look like a hero at all. In a normal setting, he is a classic loser, unable to adapt to life. Because of this, he is poor and abandoned by his wife. The novel of his life remains at the level of the first phrase about the Amazon. However, at the moment of common misfortune, courage wakes up in this little man. He is a hero, but not one of those who rush during the chaos of the epidemic, Gran manages to remain calm and continue to regulate the work of the squads day after day. Having fallen ill with the plague, he miraculously recovers, and this incident becomes the beginning of the victory over the disease.
The smuggler Cottar is a vivid example of those people who only benefit from misfortune. While everyone is dying from the epidemic, he rejoices in the ensuing chaos, because of which he avoids prison. He manages to make a fortune during a terrible misfortune, but the inner emptiness and loneliness lead him to insanity. At the beginning of the novel, he tries to hang himself, but this suicide attempt is more like a cry for help. Behind his ostentatious indifference lies loneliness, with which the hero never copes.
There are also several female characters in the novel. First of all, this is the doctor's wife - a selfless woman, trying to the last not to worry her husband and hiding the deterioration of her health.
Rie's mother looks just as worthy. She shows kindness and care to her son and his friends. No wonder Tarru admires her in his notes.
Even in the novel, the faithful wife of Rambert is mentioned, who was waiting for her husband all the time while he was locked up in quarantine.
Albert Camus, "The Plague": a summary of the novel
Having dealt with the composition of the novel and the main characters, it is worth moving on to the plot. He created in his work a fairly clear architecture of Camus. "Plague" (a summary of the chapters is better to state) consists of 5 parts.
So, chapter one. It tells about the Algerian seaside town of Oran.
In early April, the doctor finds a dead rat on the steps of his house, and later another. After taking his wife to the train (she is leaving for a sanatorium for treatment), Rieux discusses with the local investigator the increase in the number of rats in the city. In the afternoon, the doctor gives an interview to Rambert, a correspondent from Paris.
A few days later, rats in the city began to crawl out of their holes in whole flocks and die. Their numbers increased so much that in just one day 6,231 rat corpses were burned.
Soon the watchman from the doctor's house fell ill with a strange illness and died. By that time, the rats had disappeared, and people began to get sick with an unknown fever with a fatal outcome. Rie gathers colleagues to find out what kind of disease it is. The results of the analyzes show that this is an unusual type of plague.
The city authorities were in no hurry to respond to the epidemic, and only through the efforts of Rieux managed to force them to take preventive measures. Meanwhile, the number of deaths reaches 30 per day, and only then the city is quarantined.
II chapter. Even after the start of quarantine, the townspeople could not grasp the reality of what was happening. However, when the death toll exceeded several hundred, they became afraid. Many residents were sent on vacation at their own expense, gasoline and essential products were sold in limited quantities. Many shops closed, and only cafes prospered.
At the end of the first month of quarantine, journalist Rambert came to the doctor and asked him to help him leave the city. Rieux could not help the guy, and he began to look for other ways through the smuggler Cottar.
In the meantime, more than 100 people were dying from the infection a day. To restore order, Tarrou persuades Rieux to organize sanitary groups. Rambert, waiting for an opportunity to escape from the city, also begins to work in the sanitary squads.
Chapter III. Looting has increased in the city. The poor suffered more than the rich, but the plague spared no one. There were not enough coffins, and the bodies of the dead began to be burned. The people were in despair.
Chapter IV. The plague continues to rage. Rambert, having got the opportunity to escape from the city, but, inspired by the example of the doctor, remains to work in the sanitary squads, corresponding with his wife. A new anti-plague vaccine has been developed in the city, but it does not help. Soon the priest Panlu dies. Gran falls ill, but suddenly recovers, followed by several more patients, and it becomes clear that the epidemic is on the decline.
V chapter. Despite the gradual retreat of the plague, the inhabitants of the city could not believe it. However, on the eve of the victory over the plague, Tarra fell ill and died, which knocked the doctor down even more than the subsequent news of the death of his wife in the sanatorium.
In February, quarantine was lifted from the city, and people were happy to meet their relatives after a long separation. The doctor continued to work and thought that the plague virus had not been killed and could return at any moment.
Symbols in the novel
Despite the apparent simplicity of the plot, Camus's novel "The Plague" is full of symbols (a summary of the work is above).
The most important symbol in the novel-parable is the plague itself. Its distribution occurs contrary to all laws of logic and justice. She spares no one: both the noble dreamer Tarru and the honest priest Panlu die. At the same time, the old man Gran is recovering, and the smuggler Cottar is not ill at all. In a narrow sense, the plague is fascism, which almost destroyed Europe. However, Camus suggested understanding it as a symbol of global indestructible evil, which is always there, ready to attack, and which must be fought constantly.
Another symbolic harbingers of the plague - rats.
They are like the small weaknesses of people, which usually bring only minor inconveniences, but with an increase in their number, they can cause great trouble. So, at first, no one pays attention to rats, until there are a lot of them. It is noteworthy that at the end of the novel, rats reappear in the city, as a symbol of the fact that a person always has minor weaknesses, and no one knows which of them can turn into a disaster in the future. In this case, we can draw an analogy with one of the "fathers" of fascism, Adolf Hitler. Due to difficult family relationships, he had a negative attitude towards Jews from childhood. In particular, this shortcoming of his did not affect anything, but when the Fuhrer stood at the head of a great nation, it was this petty weakness that led to the death of millions of Abraham's descendants.
Screen adaptation
Despite the popularity of the novel, it was filmed only in 1992.
The film of the same name is devoid of many plot elements of the novel, while it contains interesting finds. So, to convey the atmosphere of the book, the film completely lacks musical accompaniment. In addition, the atmosphere of the film is modernized, and because of this, it looks even more frightening.
In this article, we discussed the plot of a serious novel, however, only a brief summary of it is presented to your attention. Albert Camus ("The Plague" is by no means his only work with a philosophical meaning) surprisingly accurately conveyed the atmosphere of a plagued city, and it would not be out of place for everyone to read this book in its entirety.
