The Plague

The novel that I chose to do this report on was, "The

Plague", by Albert Camus. It is about a plague that hit the

European countries in the middle ages. I chose to describe

the literary term of parallelism. Here are some following facts

about the story's plot that involve parallelism through the

novel. The novel begins at Oran where the plague becomes

known. The main character, Dr. Gernard Rieux, is a doctor.

In the beginning of the story he finds a dead rat on the floor.

Even in those times rats were not found dead on the middle

of the floor. This was unusual, but he threw out the rat and

forgot about it. Eventually the dead rats began to pile into

large masses and burned. Soon after there were some

people that got very sick, which made Mr. Rieux very

curious. These reports of these ill people and the death of

the rats were the beginning of the parallelism for this story.

Since Bernard was a doctor he was the first to actually

attempt to help one of these sick people. Michael was his

first patient in this matter. He was the sickest person that the

doctor had ever seen. Michael was pale white and vomited

often, he hurt so much from the vomiting that he seemed

paralyzed. Mr. Rieux tried to help the man the best that he

could, but he ended up dying. Michael was the first person

to die of this illness. After his death, many cases of this

illness were reported widespread. Again more details of

sickness and death, this is the parallelism for this novel. As

the reports of sickness and death came to inform Dr. Rieux,

he tried to comfort and cure the plagued patients. About

ninety percent of the people infected had died. He wanted a