The Plague

A bit more than a year ago, I read Camus's first novel, The Stranger, and was deeply affected by it. I referred to it as both existentialistic and nihilistic in my post, a bit unclear back then that Camus was considered more of an absurdist than an existentialist or a nihilist - though granted, all three schools of thought are related and in many ways derived from one another. (Just click here.) Anyway, what affected me most about The Stranger wasn't its philosophical messages or morals, but the emotional apathy of its protagonist. The man seems utterly unfazed whether he attends his mother's funeral, becomes engaged to his girlfriend, or murders a man in cold blood. Only once his fate has been sealed does any sense of self-awareness or introspection kick in, and the dark and deeply philosophical final chapter essentially ends with the protagonist embracing the idea that his death is coming soon because, hey, it's going to come one day anyway, so why bother fighting it? The book is many things, but hopeless - nay, even "anti-hope" - is chief among them.

How strange, then, that The Plague - a story where a resurgent bubonic plague epidemic blows up in a quarantined city - ends with its narrator reflecting that there is more to praise than despise in humanity. This is a decidedly optimistic and cheerful approach to life, which at first glance runs counter to the big takeaway from The Stranger. And yet, it isn't. You can hold both opinions at once, and they don't really contradict one another. That death comes for us all and that there's no point in hoping otherwise is a stark and depressing reality, but it need not contradict the idea that people are fundamentally decent. In fact, Camus's own personal philosophy has often been described succinctly as "optimism without hope." It sounds like a paradox, but it really isn't. If you just accept that life is meaningless and temporary and that the universe is indifferent to humanity entirely, you're not just atheistic; you're nihilistic. But then if you can construct meaning in life for yourself, the indifference of the cold and unfeeling universe be damned, then you're existentialistic. That's how I understand it, at least. Camus was an absurdist, which is to say a mixture of these things, sort of like how an agnostic sits on the fence between believing and doubting. The nihilist says that life has no meaning and the existentialist says that you must create your own meaning in life. The absurdist recognizes both points and notes the contradiction between man's desire to have meaning and the universe's utter apparent meaninglessness.

At any rate, digging into these philosophies and several essays on the subject has been great, and I'm glad The Plague inspired me to further explore Camus and his world view. Still, I can't say that I loved reading The Plague. I liked it, and it told a neat little story about the human condition with lots of thematic heft, but it just never pulled me in like The Stranger did. That's fine and all, but if you want to give Camus a shot I'd absolutely insist you start out with the shorter and earlier book, The Stranger. I've got Camus's third novel - his last, before dying in a car accident at forty-seven - waiting in my backlog, and it seems like his shortest one by far. Time will tell.