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.”