Existentialism and the PlagueIn the mid-1940s, a man named Albert Camus began to write a story. He called this story La Pesté. Written in French, the novel became extremely popular and has since been translated numerous times into many languages. This story has been read over and over again, yet it tells more than meets the eye. This story tells the story of a city hit by a deadly disease. That's true enough, but that's not what the novel is about. The Plague can be read as an allegory of the Second World War, of the French Resistance against the German occupation. “To simplify things we can say that The Plague is an allegorical novel” (Picon 146). However, this is really an oversimplification and therefore only tells part of the story. Camus is often considered an existentialist. “That existentialist philosophies offered him a vocabulary from which he occasionally borrowed is of secondary importance in his case” (Brée, Camus 74). Perhaps this, Existentialism, is the fulcrum of the novel? No, it's not quite that simple. The Plague tells the story of a struggle: not a struggle against a disease, not a struggle against German soldiers, but a struggle against indifference in the face of human suffering. Each man responds to this in his own way, and this touches the heart of existential philosophy: it is the actions that truly define a man. “No, I am not an existentialist” (Doubrovsky 345). These words come from Albert Camus himself. It is true; Camus was not an existentialist. Yes, he embraced much of existentialism, but not all of it. What then do existentialists believe and, of this, what does Camus reject and what does he accept? For the existentialist, life has no meaning in and of itself. Therefore, "Since lif...... middle of paper ......bert. Albert Camus: The Invisible Summer. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1958.Masters, Brian. Camus: A Study. Totowa , NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1974. McCarthy, Patrick Camus: A Critical Study of His Life and Work London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982.McMullen, Laura Elizabeth "Internet Document. wwc.edu/student/mcmula/camus.htm. 2K size. 11 April 96.Parker, Albert Camus: The Artist in the Arena Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.Picon, Gaëtan The Plague." Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. L'Usage de la lechire. Paris: Mercure de France 1960. 79-87. Camus: A Critical Examination. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Albert Camus York: Abdingdon Press, 1975.