Research Paper on:
The Plague by Albert Camus and Human Meaning Struggles

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
of political manipulation, and the crisis of metaphysical reason and morality. Although Camus states that this work was not one of morality, the struggle for human meaning during the epidemic  plague in Oran in the 1940s involves the characters questioning the breakdown of their social and political systems in which they are imprisoned in their own village. During the plague  which seems to have no reason in who is killed and who is spared, the characters also struggle to apply some sort of metaphysical sense to the plague. While the  village eventually overcomes the plague, Rieux and Tarrou remind the readers that the plague never truly disappears and that everyone contains aspects of the plague; a reminder to the reader  that in times of a chaos, human reasoning does not apply. Albert Camus "The Plague" recounts the impact of a typhus epidemic in  Oran, Algeria which killed over 75,000 in the 1940s. Since its original publication, it has never been used as an epidemiological study but rather as an allegory and philosophical index  for the effects a plague, of any kind, can have on a community in regards to their social networks, their political affiliations, and their metaphysical reasoning. "The Plague" has also  been used, similar to George Orwells "1984" to describe the impact and the reaction of the Nazi invasion on France during World War II. The underlying moral authority of resistance  to the invasion brought about deep political and moral questions in the mind of the citizens who were being infected by the Nazi "plague" (Kirp, Koehler and Rossi 34).  From the interpretations which have existed on The Plague, many return to the letter from Albert Camus to Roland Barthes in 1955 in which