Plague(A) Essay, Research Paper
The Plague by Albert Camus 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 choseto describe the literary term of parallelism. Here are some following facts about the story’s plotthat 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 he finds a deadrat on the floor. Even in those times rats were not found dead on the middle of the floor. This wasunusual, but he threw out the rat and forgot about it. Eventually the dead rats began to pileinto large masses and burned. Soon after there were some people that got very sick, which madeMr. Rieux very curious. These reports of these ill people and the death of the rats werethe beginning of the parallelism for this story. Since Bernard was a doctor he was the first to actually attempt to help oneof these sick people. Michael was his first patient in this matter. He was the sickestperson that the doctor had ever seen. Michael was pale white and vomited often, he hurt so much fromthe 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, man
cases of this illness were reported widespread. Again more details of sickness and death, this is theparallelism for this novel. As the reports of sickness and death came to inform Dr. Rieux, he tried tocomfort and cure the plagued patients. About ninety percent of the people infected haddied. He wanted a stop to this plague. Quickly he linked the rats with the people. He knew thatthe rats began to get sick before the people did. At this time many people had the plague, except forthe Chinese visitors. They never were infected. As the plot moves on death, sickness and theplague are still 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 in these daysbathed. The doctor began to notice that the people that bathed never got sick. So he asked all ofhis, still living patients, to take baths frequently. This proved to be the miracle cure for the people. The doctor asked his 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 represented the story’sparallelism. Albert Camus made parallelism the main literary term for this novel, given away by thetitle, “The Plague.”