That is not to say that a life without meaning is all for nothing, but that being happy in your life and the way that you live it should be reward enough and does not need any further significance attributed to it. This allegorical tale is a platform on which Camus is able to present his main philosophical ideals, key of which is that of man seeking to find meaning and significance in his life and finding none. Our anonymous narrator attempts to report the events in an observational and unbiased manner and is successful in their reporting but is not entirely able to remove the element of human nature the fear, the desperation to return to normality and absent loves, the despair at death and too, the prevailing nature of humanity itself.Īlbert Camus was a Nobel laureate, philosopher and contemporary of that other famous literary philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. It isn’t long before this sickness spreads to the human population and soon this town is shut off from the rest of the world, quarantined and left to deal with it on their own. Then one day rats start showing up in frightening numbers, dead or dying in a horrific manner.

Happy in their everyday life, not overly spectacular in one way or another. Oran is a small town like any other populated by people who seem to be engaged in a busy nothingness.

The plague albert camus pages