The Plague (novel)

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The Plague (French: La Peste) is a 1947 absurdist novel by Albert Camus. The plot centers around the French Algerian city of Oran as it combats a plague outbreak and is put under a city-wide quarantine. The novel presents a snapshot into life in Oran as seen through Camus's absurdist lens. Camus used as source material the cholera epidemic that killed a large proportion of Oran's population in 1849, but set the novel in the 1940s. Oran and its surroundings were struck by disease several times before Camus published his novel. According to an academic study, Oran was decimated by the bubonic plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks (185 cases in 1921, 76 cases in 1931, and 95 cases in 1944) were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel. The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus's objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their own destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka...

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