Albert Camus “the Plague”Albert Camus’ “The Plague”The novel that I chose to do this report on was, “The Plague”, by AlbertCamus. It is about a plague that hit the European countries in the middle ages.
I chose to describe the literary term of parallelism. Here are some followingfacts about the story’s plot that involve parallelism through the novel. The novel begins at Oran where the plague becomes known. The maincharacter, Dr.
Gernard Rieux, is a doctor. In the beginning of the story hefinds a dead rat on the floor. Even in those times rats were not found dead onthe middle of the floor. This was unusual, but he threw out the rat and forgotabout it. Eventually the dead rats began to pile into large masses and burned. Soon after there were some people that got very sick, which made Mr.
Rieux verycurious. These reports of these ill people and the death of the rats were thebeginning of the parallelism for this story. Since Bernard was a doctor he was the first to actually attempt to helpone of these sick people. Michael was his first patient in this matter. He wasthe sickest person that the doctor had ever seen. Michael was pale white andvomited often, he hurt so much from the vomiting that he seemed paralyzed.
Mr. Rieux tried to help the man the best that he could, but he ended up dying. Michael was the first person to die of this illness. After his death, manycases of this illness were reported widespread.
Again more details of sicknessand death, this is the parallelism for this novel. As the reports of sickness and death came to inform Dr. Rieux, he triedto comfort and cure the plagued patients. About ninety percent of the peopleinfected had died. He wanted a stop to this plague. Quickly he linked the ratswith the people.
He knew that the rats began to get sick before the people did. At this time many people had the plague, except for the Chinese visitors. Theynever were infected. As the plot moves on death, sickness and the plague arestill relevant.
He studied their behaviors and everyday tasks and learned that they dosomething that was never often done in these middle ages. Not many people inthese days bathed. The doctor began to notice that the people that bathed nevergot sick. So he asked all of his, still living patients, to take bathsfrequently.
This proved to be the miracle cure for the people. The doctor askedhis other fellow doctors to follow the same practice with their patients. Theword was spread and the plague was soon wiped out. So as you can see, the literary term of parallelism was deemed veryrelevant through the ongoing plot. Death, sickness, and the plague epresentedthe story’s parallelism.
Albert Camus made parallelism the main literary termfor this novel, given away by the title, “The Plague.”
