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Need help with my writing homework on Discuss what you perceive to be the main themes of La Peste. Write a 2500 word paper answering; me reality that faces them. Keenly aware of the meaninglessness of human condition,the citizens assert their humanity by rebelling against their circumstance in their own unique ways , and finding solidarity among themselves during the excruciating times of danger.Some of the main themes addressed throughout the novel are:

Camus made no efforts to conceal that the novel was partly an allegory of the French resistence to The Nazi forces of oppression during World War 2.The plague symbolizes The German invasion with its inhuman fatalities and violent barbarity.The solidarity and fight of the citizens of Oran against the epidemic corresponds to the struggle and determination of the revolt against the nightmare and rise of Nazism.Camus in 1955 said that the plague can apply to any resistance against any tyranny.The Plague metaphor is more complicated and flexible than the obvious correlation with the Nazi occupation that most people make on reading the novel.It can symbolize any calamity or disaster that tests the endurance of human beings and challenges their solidarity,sense of responsibility,compassion and will power.1

Isolation and Separation:

As can be imagined,one of the major effects of a city quarantined is the resurgence of feelings of isolation,exile and futility among the victims. The picture of man in isolation, with or without a state

1John Krapp,”Time and Ethics in Albert Camus’s The Plague,University of Toronto Quarterly,Volume 68 Number 2,(Spring 1999).

of pestilence, is most vividly portrayed in the character of Grand. The need for human communication and affection is poignantly shown in the figure of this obscure, limited man . His heroism consists of his innate humanity which leads him to perform without reflection commonplace aspects of the work of the sanitary teams which lie within his capabilities. Grand reserves for himself, however, certain hours of the evening which he devotes to his life’s most important work. He is writing a novel. Though he has produced many pages of manuscript he has not as yet progressed beyond the first sentence. The search for the exact word that will be the true expression of his thoughts haunts his every moment. This barrier of words hinders him in his conversations with his friends and was the cause, long before, of his wife leaving him. “As long as we were in love, we understood one another without words. But people are not in love all the time. There came a time when I should have found the words that would have kept her with me, but I wasn’t able to.”

When Grand is stricken with the plague it is of Jeanne,his separated wife, that he thinks, of the letter he never wrote, the novel that will never be finished. And Rieux, witnessing the tears of this old man, feels a profound sorrow and sympathy which months of fighting the plague had seemingly stifled within him.