Book Review: The Plague by Albert Camus

Having attained the status of an absurdist through the publishing of his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, all that was left to do is even further develop Camus' theory of absurdism, yet through an indirect means which invokes reflection and thought. Camus wrote The Plague, his second novel, which was published in 1947. The indirect way in which absurdist elements are illustrated in the plague is comparable and consistent to a great extent with the more existentially-inclined elements which make up the essence of The Stranger. However, one needn't search as deep as in The Stranger to extract significant philosophical meaning in The Plague. This is because although vibrant with regard to symbolism, the plot of the novel itself is very openly suggestive of absurdism.

The story deals with the efforts of individuals working at a hospital when confronted with an unexplainable condition befalling a great number of people. The entirety of the story deals with the incredibly futile yet non-ceasing efforts of the medical personnel at this hospital to find a cure while dealing constantly with the numerous victims the plague claims. Of these soon-to-be victims, some individuals, such as Othon's son do not give up hope, yet still die just as cruelly and as inevitably as those who have already come to terms with their impending fate.

While Camus seems to carry out his absurdist agenda through The Plague in a rather blunt manner, there is also deeper substance to the novel in terms of symbolism. The plague all individuals in the novel have to deal with seems to be consistent to it's fullest entirety with the human condition described by absurdism. This is because the plague itself is indicative of the poor, undesirable, filled with anguish, and entirely devoid of any reassuring meaning. While the central purpose surrounding the plague itself seems to be its defeat, the much more significant aspect of the plague is the impossibility to avoid it. This in turn illustrates the lack of control we are subjected to as humans, regardless of our efforts to disprove this fact, especially when any attempts to overcome this force which seems to oppose our happiness simply results in no self-improvement, but instead only further anguish.

In spite of the fact that absurdism as a stand-alone philosophy had acquired significantly more interest than it had back when Camus' first novel was published, The Plague had still been labeled by many following its publication as an existentialist work. Camus had denied being an existentialist on numerous occasions, but even so numerous critics found adequate reason to believe that due to the seemingly redemptive ending of the novel, this advocated hope for a non-futile search for meaning. More specifically, The Plague ends when after the miraculously unexpected cure of a victim of the plague, the death toll from the disease drops significantly.

Soon enough, there are no more cases of the plague and all the individuals who had been separated from either friends or family due to having been quarantined in the past are finally returned to what is left. While this ending seems to be suggestive of an overdue hope being fulfilled, a definitive end to anguish and a vivid hope for new beginnings, this outcome is in fact portrayed as entirely isolated from human influence. Regardless of the tedious efforts of Dr. Rieux to formulate a cure for the plague, in the end everyone is saved from unthought-of circumstances. Regardless of the futile attempts of the individuals who had been diagnosed with the plague and died, they did not live to embrace the seemingly harmonious ending.

Furthermore, it is the means by which humans exerted an absolute lack of control towards the ending, however positive it may have seemed, that advocates for the serenity which follows a willful abolishment of hope in favor of acceptance. This dubs The Plague an absurdist writing rather than an existentialist one, and in it we see the further evolution of absurdism as a philosophy which is not only independent from the one which it branched out from, but also able to be developed indirectly as a theme in a novel rather than being the central focus of a philosophical essay.