The Plague Essay, Research Paper
The novel that I chose to do this report on was, “The Plague”, by
Albert Camus. It is about a plague that hit the European countries in
the middle ages. I chose to describe the literary term of parallelism.
Here are some following facts about the story’s plot that involve
parallelism through the novel. The novel begins at Oran where the
plague becomes known. The main character, Dr. Gernard Rieux, is
a doctor. In the beginning of the story he finds a dead rat on the
floor. Even in those times rats were not found dead on the middle
of the floor. This was unusual, but he threw out the rat and forgot
about it. Eventually the dead rats began to pile into large masses
and burned. Soon after there were some people that got very sick,
which made Mr. Rieux very curious. These reports of these ill
people and the death of the rats were the beginning of the
parallelism for this story. Since Bernard was a doctor he was the
first to actually attempt to help one of these sick people. Michael
was his first patient in this matter. He was the sickest person that
the doctor had ever seen. Michael was pale white and vomited
often, he hurt so much from the vomiting that he seemed paralyzed.
Mr. Rieux tried to help the man the best that he could, but he ended
up dying. Michael was the first person to die of this illness. After
his death, many cases of this illness were reported widespread.
Again more details of sickness and death, this is the parallelism for
this novel.
As the reports of sickness and death came to inform Dr. Rieux, he
tried to comfort and cure the plagued patients. About ninety percent
of the people infected had died. He wanted a stop to this plague.
Quickly he linked the rats with the people. He knew that the rats
began to get sick before the people did. At this time many people
had the plague, except for the Chinese visitors. They never were
infected. As the plot moves on death, sickness and the plague are
still relevant. He studied their behaviors and everyday tasks and
learned that they do something that was never often done in these
middle ages. Not many people in these days bathed. The doctor
began to notice that the people that bathed never got sick. So he
asked all of his, still living patients, to take baths frequently. This
proved to be the miracle cure for the people. The doctor asked his
other fellow doctors to follow the same practice with their patients.
The word was spread and the plague was soon wiped out. So as
you can see, the literary term of parallelism was deemed very
relevant through the ongoing plot. Death, sickness, and the plague
epresented the story’s parallelism. Albert Camus made parallelism
the main literary term for this novel, given away by the title, “The
Plague.”