Albert Camus was born on the 7th of November 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria to Lucien Camus, whose family had settled in Algeria in 1871, and Catherine Sintes, of Spanish origin. During Camus' high school years, he met Jean Grenier, the man who would influence Camus' career to the greatest extent by opening his mind to the philosophy of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Bergson. He and Grenier focused much of their writing on the duality of mortality.
Still achieving highly at school, Camus received his diploma from the University in philosophy in 1936, examining the legacies and conflicts of thought in his thesis, which would later inhabit his works. The philosophy of moralism he formulated led to his ideas of the absurd, a state which can only exist if God is absent.
As World War II began, Camus moved to Paris where he completed one of his most famous works, The Stranger. However, in 1941 he returned to Oran, Algeria where he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus. In 1942, illness forced him to return to France and convalesce in the Massif-Central region where he published The Stranger. He remained in Southern France because of the allied invasion of North Africa and got separated from his wife in Algeria until after the liberation in 1944. During 1943, he joined the French Resistance and became a journalist at the resistance newspaper, Combat. France got liberated in 1944, Camus came into contact with many of the figures who would shape the moralist philosophies of his life: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur Koestler, and Maria Casarès. He has also won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
France was invaded by Germany in 1940 and this resulted in a national humiliation. Some of the writers fled to spend the remaining years in...
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...o do absurd things in our lives, in an attempt to make it more perfect for ourselves.
Another theme, rather a cause that Camus takes up in his novel is his anti-capital punishment stance through Tarrou. Tarrou has seen his father condemn a man to cold-blooded death, and this makes him revolt against an unjust system.
Camus has interwoven a number of themes in his novel to make it a novel for the triumph of the spirit of humanity under trial and hardships. Summing up, I quote Camus who says about the book," I want to express by means of The Plague, the suffocation from which we all suffered, and the atmosphere of menace and exile in which wee all lived. At the same time, I want to extend this interpretation to cover the notion of existence in general. The Plague will describe those whose lot in this war was one of silence, of reflection, and of moral suffering."
Albert Camus is a skillful writer noted for showing aspects of culture and society through the depiction of his characters. In The Stranger, Camus illustrates the existentialism culture and how that comes into play in the life of the protagonist Meursault. The Stranger, as suggested by the title, is a novel revolving around the protagonist, Meursault, who is a stranger to the French-Algerian society as he challenges its values. Camus vividly portrays Meursault’s journey through the use of imagery, irony, and symbolism. In The Stranger, Albert Camus uses the minor character, Raymond Sintes, to illustrate the contrasting nature of Meursault and how his friendship with Raymond leads to his downfall.
The interesting concept of the absurd hero is classically presented by the author, Albert Camus in many of his novels, including The Plague. An absurd hero is a person who does what he has to do regardless of whether or not he can control that situation. Dr. Rieux, a physician in the plagued town, for example, still performs his job daily and just as diligent as he ever has, instead of caving in to the worry and fear that his town experiences because of this widespread epidemic. Camus uses this concept of the absurd hero to develop the four main characters, Tarrou, Rambert, Grand, but especially Dr. Bernard Rieux.
Throughout the post World War Two era, many people became homeless in countries such as France, Poland, Belgium and other territories of war because of the economic collapse. A Cold War also emerged between the two rising power countries in the world, the USSR and the United States. The emergence of the United Nations, which was a council where the countries of the world could get together so they could discuss global issues, had given some hope to those but only on the surface. In France specifically, there were homeless people all over because of economic weakness, little military power because of Hitler’s occupation of France, and most importantly the corrupted psychology of the people. Jean Paul Sartre became part of the miserable France after World War Two. Sartre fit right into the era of doubt and dismay. He was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and critic. He also became one of the primary figures in philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, along with being a leading figure in 20th century philosophy and Marxism. When Sartre was captured during World War Two by German troops, he realized no person existed that did not make an impact on the entire human race such as Hitler who had made a negative impact on the world. What makes Sartre unique to the era of misery in France because he questioned God and changed France’s presence in the world by making the French change how they acted towards one another and how to question, with the new philosophy of existentialism that states one person fashions the entire race.
The Plague (French, La Peste) is a novel written by Albert Camus that is about an epidemic of bubonic plague. The Plague is set in a small Mediterranean town in North Africa called Oran. Dr. Bernard Rieux, one of the main characters, describes it as an ugly town. Oran’s inhabitants are boring people who appear to live, for the most part, habitual lives. The main focus of the town is money. “…everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, 'doing business’” (Camus 4). The citizens’ unawareness of life’s riches and pleasures show their susceptibility to the oncoming plague. They don’t bother themselves with matters not involving money. It is very easy for the reader to realize that they are too naive to combat the forthcoming calamity. The theme of not knowing life is more than work and habits will narrow the people’s chances of survival. Rieux explains that the town had a view of death as something that happens every day. He then explains that the town really doesn’t face towards the Mediterranean Sea. Actually it is almost impossible to see the sea from town. Oran is a town which seems to turn its back on life and freedom. The Plague was first published in 1948 in France. “Early readers were quick to note that it was in part an allegory of the German occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, which cut France off from the outside world; just as in the novel the town of Oran must close its gates to isolate the plague” (“The Plague” 202). When the plague first arrives, the residents are slow to realize the extreme danger they are in. Once they finally become aware of it...
Albert Camus’ The Stranger offers one man’s incite into the justice of society. Monsieur Meursault, the main protagonist in the novel, believes that morals and the concept of right and wrong possess no importance. This idea influences him to act distinctively in situations that require emotion and just decision, including feeling sadness over his mother’s death, the abuse of a woman, and his killing of an innocent man. In these situations Meursault apathetically devoids himself of all emotion and abstains from dealing with the reality in front of him. When confronted by the court over his murder, he reiterates his habitual motto on life that nothing matters anyways, so why care? His uncaring response inflames the people working within the
Albert Camus’s The Plague is a novel about an ordinary town that is suddenly stricken by plague. A few of Camus’s philosophies such as the absurd, separation, and isolation are incorporated in the events of the story. The absurd, which is the human desire for purpose and significance in a meaningless and indifferent universe, is central to the understanding of The Plague. In The Plague, Camus uses character development and irony to show that even through the obvious superiority of the universe, man is in constant effort to outlive the absurd. The Plague is crafted around the belief that humans live life in search of a value or purpose that will never be revealed to them because it does not exist.
In the experimental novel The Stranger by Albert Camus, he explores the concept of existentialism and the idea that humans are born into nothing and descend into nothingness after death. The novel takes place in the French colony of Algiers where the French-Algerians working-class colonists live in an urban setting where simple life pleasures are of the upmost importance in the lives of working class people like the protagonist of the novel Meursault. What is fascinating about this novel is that it opens up with a scene of perpetual misfortune for him through the death of his mother although he seems to express otherwise. The reader perceives this nonchalance as a lack of care. Maman’s death and its impact on Meursault appear in both the very beginning and very end of the two-part novel, suggesting a cyclical pattern in the structure. This cyclical pattern suggests not a change in the moral beliefs of Meursault but rather his registering society’s systems and beliefs and craft meaning in his own life despite the fact that he meets his demise in the end. Camus uses Maman’s funeral to characterise both Meursault and the society and customs created by the society Meursault lives in in order to contrast the two while at the same time reveal how while society changes, Meursault does not. Rather, Maman’s funeral becomes of unprecedented importance in Meursault’s life and allows him to find that nothing means anything in his meaningless world at the time of his death. He finds peace in that.
From 1935 he worked as a teacher, notably at Lycée Descartes in Tours, then in Paris at Lycée Marcelin Berthelot. At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the French army, but was captured by the Germans and spent eighteen months in a camp as a prisoner of war. During this period he learned German and wrote poems, which were published in HOSTIES NOIRES (1948). In 1944 he was appointed professor of African languages at the École Nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer.
In The Stranger, Albert Camus describes the life of the protagonist, Meursault, through life changing events. The passage chosen illustrates Meursault’s view during his time in prison for killing the Arab. In prison, one can see the shifts in Meursault’s character and the acceptance of this new lifestyle. Camus manipulates diction to indicate the changes in Meursault caused by time thinking of memories in prison and realization of his pointless life. Because Camus published this book at the beginning of World War II, people at this time period also questions life and death similar to how Meursault does.
Albert Camus was a French writer who was very well known all over the world for his different works but especially with the idea of “absurdism”. Camus believed that something that was absurd was not possible by humans or logically. It was beyond ridiculous and therefore impossible. This was the basis of one of his most famous works, The Plague. The Plague is a novel that explores aspects of human nature and condition, destiny, God, and fate. The novel is about a plague that takes place in Oran, Algeria that is fictional, but it’s believed to be relatively based on a cholera outbreak in the mid 1800’s in Oran that killed thousands of people. Dr. Bernard Rieux is the protagonist but also is the narrator. However, he doesn’t admit to being the narrator until the end of the novel. Camus writes in the beginning that the instances in Oran are being told by witnesses of the plague. In The Plague, Camus wants his audience to read the book unbiasedly not knowing the narrator in order to take sides with the characters that one wants to and not to be persuaded by the narrators telling of the events.
The climax of the novel The Stranger is reached when the jury declares that the main character, Meursault, is to be executed by gulliotine in the town square. The trial and its verdict are one of the important parts of the novel, as Albert Camus uses them as a metaphor to summarize the three main tenets of absurdism. Camus uses the trial and conviction of Meursault to express the absurdist ideals that truth does not exist, and human life is precious.
After only a few days of trial, the jury in The Stranger declares that the main character, Meursault, is to be executed by guillotine in the town square. The trial and its verdict are one of the important parts of the novel, as Albert Camus uses them as a metaphor to summarize the two main tenets of absurdism. Camus uses the trial and persecution of Meursault to express his belief that the justice system is flawed because of his absurdist ideals that truth does not exist, and human life is precious. In order to reform the justice system, Albert Camus believes that capital punishment needs to be abolished.
“... I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave;...I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day. The exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at a motionless body” (Camus, 59). Most in modern or really any time, would find that murdering an innocent, for simply the reason of “because why not” very odd, but Camus expresses his true feelings on the unimportance of life through this murder. In all of Camus works, he questions the absurdity of human existence, but one of his works really questioned the importance of human lives, in the book The Rebel, Camus answers the question with the phrase of “why should i not kill others”. This all ties back to the death of the arab, because Camus sees it as unimportant. Camus had a very nihilistic point of view when he wrote about Meursault's relationship with his mother and how he handled her death, during his own mothers funeral he was complaining that it was too bright, showed no grief for his late mother and then smoked a cigarette; then later that night he went to a comical movie and spent the night with a girl. Nihilist reject the concept of morals and from mersualts monologue, most would say that he is disconnected with his morals; that he should be broken over the death of his mother. But Camus believed that one should not love their mother simply because of the
Absurdity, why does one event occur, yet the most obvious doesn’t? Many philosophers question absurdity and how it affects our everyday lives. But no matter how much it is analyzed, there is no explanation of the absurd. Even as pleasant as the world can be at times, there is no order and there is no reason for the events that occur. Albert Camus, the accomplished author of many amazing books knew about this idea and understood the meaning, which in turn influenced many of his great novels. One of his excellent novels, “The Plague,” exhibits the ideas of absurdity in many aspects. One being the idea of an absurd hero, or someone who realizes that the world lacks order, yet through that spectacular revelation continues through their respected life. Camus develops the characters in “The Plague,” to represent the characteristics of an absurd hero. One main character, Dr. Rieux is one of the best characters to describe the basis of the absurd hero. He understands that the world is absurd, but continues his work nonetheless.
To keep the absurd alive, you only have to live the absurd. Life will be more fully lived in so far as it has no meaning. is a quote from Camus that shows this. Camus shows that you can “hope” for the best without hope. The “Hope” is not the same as hope.