blog




  • Essay / Exile and the Kingdom in Camus's The Plague

    Amid the feverish horror of endemic disease and death, The Plague is a parable of human estrangement and the struggle to share life. existence. By studying the relationships exposed by Camus, the relationship between man and lover, mother and son, healer and sick, we see that the only relationship described by Camus is that between the exile and the kingdom that he searches with tortured desire. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay “So the first thing the plague brought to our city was exile. » (p.71). The first exile that Camus writes about is the physical exile of a sick city from the world and, consequently, the exile of the city's inhabitants from the realm of everyday life. The particular torment of this exile is memory; once expelled from a kingdom, the kingdom ceases to exist, living only as "a memory that serves no purpose...has only a flavor of regret." » (p. 73). Thus, the townspeople are haunted by memories of their distant loved ones and their interrupted lives, creating islands of their own exile – an exile intensified by years of monotonous selfish habits. “The truth is that everyone is bored and dedicated to cultivating habits.” (p.4). The polka dot counter is the ultimate representation of this exile; he is completely removed from the reality of man, measuring his life in the perpetual repetition of an absurd activity. Through the character of Rambert, Camus defines the plague as precisely this selfish exile from habit, that of doing "...the same thing again and again and again..." (p. 161). Exile is further compounded by the desperation with which many characters embark on the quest to attempt to regain their remembered personal realms. Rambert, the guest journalist, is the most striking example; literally trying to escape from the exiled city, he makes mad efforts to return to his kingdom of romantic love, although he eventually realizes that selfishness makes this kingdom empty. Grand, exiled by his inarticulability, perpetually attempts to put an end to isolation by completing his manuscript; unfortunately he can never finish the first sentence. An anonymous and crazy plague victim rushes into the street and kisses the first woman he sees, trying to break the terrible isolation of the egoist, trying to share his exile. The kingdoms these townspeople seek to reclaim never existed, and they suffer the deepest and most desperate exile of man from man. The exile and the kingdom that Father Paneloux preaches is the exile of man from the Garden. The plague now becomes a plague of the soul, a punishment of evil, a manifestation of divine wrath. In his sermon for the first Week of Prayer, Paneloux warns that "God has... brought down those who hardened against Him..." (p.95). At the time of this sermon, Father Paneloux "...has not yet come into contact with death; this is why he can speak with such assurance of the truth..." (p .126). In the year following this first sermon, Paneloux descended from his pulpit into the depths of true human suffering, joining Rieux in his campaign against the plague. It was at this time, after having witnessed the horrible and prolonged death of a child, that he definitively moved away from the kingdom of humanity, returned to the pulpit, went into exile on the path to the kingdom of humanity. God. At the time of his sermon for the second Week of Prayer, Father Paneloux pushed his vision of the plague to the point of radicalism. Believing that God's will must be accepted as his own, he denounces resistance against the plague as heresy. In a strange irony, it tells the story of a bishop who goes into exile in an ancient era of.