Essay/Term paper: The plague

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Book Reports

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

stop to this plague. Quickly he linked the rats with the

people. He knew that the rats began to get sick before the

people did. At this time many people had the plague, except

for the Chinese visitors. They never were infected. As the

plot moves on death, sickness and the plague are still

relevant. He studied their behaviors and everyday tasks and

learned that they do something that was never often done in

these middle ages. Not many people in these days bathed.

The doctor began to notice that the people that bathed never

got sick. So he asked all of his, still living patients, to take

baths frequently. This proved to be the miracle cure for the

people. The doctor asked his other fellow doctors to follow

the same practice with their patients. The word was spread

and the plague was soon wiped out. So as you can see, the

literary term of parallelism was deemed very relevant

through the ongoing plot. Death, sickness, and the plague

epresented the story's parallelism. Albert Camus made

parallelism the main literary term for this novel, given away

by the title, "The Plague."