L’homme face au fléau – Actualité de La Peste d’Albert Camus

Resumo

 The increase in sales of Albert Camus’s The Plague in times of confinement and health crisis due to the Covid-19 pandemic is symptomatic of human concern in the face of a scourge. This epidemic has shaken our certainties and confidence in this highly scientific century, exposing, at the same time, our weaknesses and helplessness.
This humanitarian crisis of the 21st century compels us, in fact, to search in literature for testimonies that could relieve our anxieties. Even if the plague in Oran depicted by Camus never existed, his work remains nonetheless poignantly topical. This is no doubt due to the explicit will of its narrator to do “the work of a historian”. In this paper we will highlight the topicality of a narration, not the
description of the epidemic itself, but rather the attitude of the characters facing the scourge, particularly the narrator, Doctor Bernard Rieux.