Embracing Both Religious and Humanistic Versions of Existentialism

" The enlarge of everyday brio he describes with al remnantly journalistic veracity: from the mixture of Spanish and French emigres that stratify society, to the marginalization of the North Africans themselves, who are all- however-invisible in this colonial enclave. The North African climate is the major " outside(prenominal)" character in The Plague, a hot-dry, wind-bleached environ where "[t]he seasons are discriminated moreover in the sky... a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you ne'er hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves... mundaneness is what strikes one set-back about the town of Oran" (3). What the author takes abundant pains to describe in terms of sterility and ugliness, he also turns on its head by calling ordinary.

front it was mentioned how metaphor is often used to disguise autobiography; in The Plague autobiography serves the purpose of metaphor. Anyone familiar with (or reading about) how lifespan is lived where desert meets sea recognizes at once the accuracy of Camus' comment of Oran. At the same time, that very setting places his following register apart from the conventional find of a city's life. The conventional view gives a city colors and shadows, variety in multi-headed forms. Oran, the Algerian colonial prefect of Camus' personal knowledge, is like a city point down the stairs a literal spotlight. Its white sterility recalls the project of a patient on the surgeon's table in the nitty-gritty of a hospital operating

Indeed, although Camus strives to avoid "moral" reasoning in the strictly philosophical-theological sniff out of the word, he very clearly makes Rambert his spokesman. A journalist himself in the beginning the War, French-speaking but not from that country, during the Occupation Camus did not extend in France:

An epidemic is an impersonal entity. There are no distinct villains in The Plague because, really, a microbe is a faceless character. One can try to demonize "the enemy," but the task is pretty much hopeless from the start: everyone already knows that being sick is bad. Demonization, a public rallying freighter a cause beyond the norm of sentiment, requires a specialised face to be drawn on evil.

A plague, metaphorically and literally, gives us no such opportunity for recognition.

Indeed, one of the most affecting passages in The Plague deals with the growing impersonality of dying. The anonymous cashier/Rieux chronicles how the rites of burial degenerate from ceremonial respect, to officious bureaucratic routine, down, finally, to tummy graves and non-stop cremations - the dead transported by an odd procession of body-filled streetcars upon which mountain throw flowers. Anonymity and poetry: "[a]nd in the warm vileness of the summer nights the cars could be heard clanking on their way, slopped with flowers and corpses" (178). Camus finds moments of absurd beauty even in the stark details of warlike death tolls.

To understand the metaphor, one must first understand the reason for using it. Following the War, France was dangerously close to being torn apart from within. Half of the country had been under the Nazi Occupation, the other half had remained free, albeit under the thumb of the collaborationist Vichy government. Despite wartime propaganda praising every Frenchman as a hotshot of the Resistance, in point of fact very few had participated. It was a sore point of ambiguity that still rubs wrong the Frenchman's sand of self-image. Camus, at the ce
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