His love for the theatre may be traced back to his membership in L'Equipe, an Algerian theatre group, whose 'collective creation' Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons. He also adapted plays by Calderon, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. But his journalistic activities had been chiefly a response to the demands of the time in 1947 Camus retired from political journalism and, besides writing his fiction and essays, was very active in the theatre as producer and playwright (e.g., Caligula, 1944). The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation was a columnist for the newspaper Combat. Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest in philosophy (only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field), he came to France at the age of twenty-five. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.Īlbert Camus (1913-1960) was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies.

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. The book tells a gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's distinctive absurdist point of view. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The Plague is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947.

The stranger and the plague