‘Salvation is too big a word for me’

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Drew Forrest examines the battle between dogmatic faith and practical humanism in French master Albert Camus’ finest novel, ‘The Plague’

Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Neverending fight: Albert Camus, author of La Peste, uses a plague to explore humanity and belief in God in fighting a catastrophe. Another layer of meaning may be the plague is a symbol of Nazi Germany’s occupation of France in World War II.

The zeal of the Abyssinians might be alien to modern enlightened spirits, Paneloux rhapsodises, but gives a glimpse of “the radiant eternal flame” that glows at the dark core of human misery and lights the shadowy path to deliverance. When, unable to bear the gale of sympathetic groans from other inmates, Rieux tries to leave, the Jesuit checks him at the doorway, murmuring “Come doctor …” Rieux turns on him fiercely: “Ah! That child, anyhow, was innocent — and you know it as well as I do!”

Later, the priest tries to revise his position, arguing in a near-heretical paper that the choice presented by a child’s death is between “All” and “Nothing” — and “and who, I ask, would dare to deny everything?” They include his presence at an execution by firing-squad which left a first-sized hole in the victim’s chest.

In a brief escape from the horrors of the stricken city, the two men then dive and swim together in the sea. The solemn ritual of the burial goes through a number of permutations that include the recycling of scarce coffins, the exclusion of mourners, cremations and, ultimately, plague pits along mediaeval lines.

 

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