Albert Camus’ Plague of Human Abstraction

One would be hard-pressed to find a work of literature more harrowing, and yet more compelling, than Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’. But in the wake of the unending suffering and devastation caused by the illness, there is also the story of a man who struggles to perfect the first sentence of his novel. A reader may wonder why on earth something so trite could be at all important, against the backdrop of a struggle between life and death— but I believe that this seemingly innocuous dilemma hides exactly the point of Camus’ most ingenuous work.

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