Authors: Dr. Pradip Molsom
Abstract: This article undertakes a sustained literary and philosophical investigation of Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague, 1947) through the convergent lenses of existentialist ethics, phenomenological temporality, and the sociology of collective suffering. The central argument holds that Camus’s novel does not merely dramatize the biological catastrophe of bubonic plague in wartime Oran; rather, it deploys the epidemic as a sustained temporal laboratory in which received moral frameworks, rooted in individual heroism, transcendent faith, and nationalistic sentiment, are systematically exhausted, only to be replaced by a more austere, provisional, and authentically human solidarity. Drawing on the concept of “epidemic time”, a distorted, suspended, and collectively experienced temporality that severs individuals from both past memory and future expectation, this study examines how Camus figures moral fatigue not as defeat but as a necessary epistemological clearing, an emptying of false consolations that paradoxically enables genuine ethical commitment. Through close readings of the novel’s five structural parts, its narrator’s shifting ironic distance, the contrasting philosophical positions of Rieux, Tarrou, Paneloux, and Rambert, and its densely recursive imagery of exile and return, the article demonstrates that solidarity in Camus is neither sentimental nor ideological but is instead an ongoing and always-threatened human invention, achieved against the grain of absurdity. The study also situates the novel within its immediate post-World War II historical context and within Camus’s broader philosophical project of the absurd and revolt, arguing that The Plague represents a pivotal, and internally contradictory, moment in his thinking about collective moral life. The article concludes by reflecting on the contemporary resonance of Camus’s vision in an age of recurring global health crises, ecological catastrophe, and resurgent political nihilism.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19588960
