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The Plague And War

Good Essays

Alex Chaisson
Mrs. Kilburn
English 2 CP
22 February 2016
The Plague and War The plague was one of the most horrific times in history. Lives were lost and the feelings of freedom was taken away from the people. This infectious illness was forced upon people and made them turn to unusual measures. These actions by the people and the spread of the disease relates to the happening in war. However the book The Plague by Albert Camus conveys a different understanding of war, specifically the Nazi occupation in Paris during World War II. The book quite obviously shows that the plague is an allegory of war. The author shows this through description describing the lack of purification, force among the people, and the feeling of suffering. …show more content…

Suffering was a constant issue and is a one word to describe what people went through during the period of the plague. Everyone in the area got a taste or glance of what suffering is and what it can be, “A tranquility so casual and thoughtless seemed almost effortlessly to give the lie to those old pictures of the plague: Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille piling rotten corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague-wind; the damp, putrefying pallets stuck to the mud floor at the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; […] nights and days filled always, everywhere, with the eternal cry of human pain. No, all these horrors were not near enough as yet even to ruffle the equanimity of that spring afternoon”(Camus, 39). Unfortunately, people do not feel sorrow for suffering until it is actually experienced. It is easy to write down the events in history but nobody can really comprehend it until it has been experienced. Which is why the situation in France is an allegory of suffering regarding the plague. France declared war on Germany before the Nazi occupation and before they took the consequences into consideration. On page 170, it shows how the disease of the plague affected the soldiers, “In the same way, whenever possible, small bodies of men had been moved out of barracks and billeted in schools or public buildings. Thus, the disease, which apparently had forced on us the solidarity of a beleaguered town, disrupted at the same time long-established communities and sent men out to live, as individuals, in relative isolation. This, too, added to the general feeling of unrest”(Camus, 170). The bodies started to increase causing the injured soldiers to move to other places, buildings, or other forms of

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