After The Plague: Thoughts? Why did Camus right this?

I have to say, I was not as big of a fan of this book as I was The Stranger. However I still think that it is an important book and Camus makes a lot of good points in it. I also have to say that I totally called that the narrator was Rieux. I think the big give away is that Rieux has a very characteristic sort of voice. That of cool logic masking fervent emotion and passion. He is obviously passionate about certain things but very good at not letting the expression of those emotions get in the way of logical goals. The narrator had a very similar tone to me. The whole "I have opinions on what happened but I'm not going to tell them to you overtly." thing. And then ends up conveying his emotions anyway more subtly through his use of language. That was just something I had been thinking about and noticing throughout the book.

It's hard to really say why Camus wrote this. I did just make that post about themes of the book, and obviously those were things he wanted to comment on, and more importantly, have the rest of society be aware of and think about and for their own opinions. I think the book as a whole illustrates some of the same absurdist ideas that The Stranger did. Camus does actually make several allusions to that work throughout The Plague. He goes about it differently though. I think partly Camus wants the readers of this book to get thinking about what they would do in a situation like this and how they would react, looking at the reactions of Camus's characters. And that hopefully leads to deeper thought about human nature in general and our reaction to disaster, and our relationship to the various themes in the book.

The Plague Themes

After finishing The Plague, I'm going to discuss some of the themes of the book. There are really four that my group decided to focus on for our presentation and talked about more in class, but there are many more. This book is pretty multi-layered (like an onion, or an ogre), and I think it's open to a lot of interpretations as far as the main idea of certain sections.
Obviously, death/mortality is a big one. Rambert asks us at a point in the novel if man is an idea. What he's really getting at is what is the lasting effect of the life of one man, and more importantly the death of one man, on everybody else. Camus asks us in The Plague to evaluate our relationship with death, and how it changes when we are surrounded by it. There's a common saying that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of many people is a statistic. I think in The Plague, the citizens of Oran progress through many different stages in coping with the epidemic and the death it brings. It eventually grows from suspicion and disbelief, to horror and fear, to reckless abandon and carelessness. They eventually become very desensitized to the idea of death and many welcome it.
I also think that Cottard plays a big role in establishing the mortality theme. He tries to take his own life before the onset of the plague. We later find out why. But it is effective at illustrating the very different relationships that people can have with death.
Camus wants us to think about that relationship, not only with our own death, but with the death of others. What does it matter if we die? What does it matter if everyone else in the town dies? He's not saying it doesn't matter, he just wants us to really think about it, and what to do about it.

The Plague by Camus-Is Man an Idea?

On Page 162 of The Plague, Rambert says that he would rather die for love than for an idea. Rieux tells him, "Man isn't an idea, Rambert", to which Rambert replies that he is. In this scene, I think Rambert is really trying to justify his actions to the other two men. He is trying to show them that maybe he is greedy, but it is better than trying to play the hero.
The way I see it, Rambert knows that Rieux and Tarrou are dying for people they don't love, that they hardly even know. And he doesn't see the point in it, other than trying to be a hero, which he doesn't believe in and actually seems to view as a sort of easy way out. He is not trying to say that he's better than them for wanting to be with the woman he loves, but he definitely doesn't, or is trying to convince himself that he doesn't, see himself as somehow less than the other men because he values people he loves more than the "idea" of people.
I don't think he is trying to argue that man is inherently nothing but an idea, but I think he's trying to argue that he can become one. Tarrou and Rieux are dying for an idea. They like the idea of helping people and saving lives. Rambert also says that man is a "precious small [idea], once he turns his back on love". It kind of goes back to an idea that is central to Camus, that life may have meaning once you give it meaning. For Rambert, that is love. If there is no love, then there is no real substance, just an idea, and a weak one at that. I would have to say that I disagree, but I can see where he is coming from.

Civic Duty: All People Should...

Note: This is a WAY longer post than I was originally intending, and for that I say I'm SORRY, and also good luck.

Ah, this is a tricky question. I think everybody has various ideas of what all people should do or should not do, and it varies from the idea that everybody should help those less fortunate than themselves, to the idea that everybody should be working from 9 to 5, to the outdated and inherently misogynistic idea of "chivalry". Whether or not people's expectations of others or of themselves in society are reasonable is another question. 

I thought about what my response to this blog was going to be for a long time (we're talking more than the usual 30 seconds), and it was hard for me to pinpoint some "civic duty" that I think all people should follow. At first I thought, well, everybody should obey laws. But there are a lot of laws that I think are outdated, or discriminatory, and would support civil disobedience in those cases. I also thought about manners in public, like not taking up three seats on the bus with all your shopping bags and forcing people to stand there next to you. This didn't really seem very urgent though, or like it qualified as "civics". That's just more about meeting the basic standards of being a decent human being. 

Later in the day, I was scrolling through facebook, and seeing all the red equal signs that people had changed their profile pictures too in an effort to show their support for marriage equality. Now, obviously the rights of gender/sexual minorities is super important to me because, you know, I am one, and everything. But I have a bone to pick with those equal signs. Because I have an even bigger bone (is that a thing that people say, it is now) to pick with the Human Rights Campaign, which is who is behind all of this. 

The HRC fits in nicely with the tradition of people claiming that they are supporting LGBTQ+ rights, and then promptly ignoring anything in that acronym except for the G, and MAYBE the L. This is apparent even in the fact that most people just refer to same sex marriage as "gay marriage", of the rights of the whole community as "gay rights". The HRC is run by awful transphobes, and racists. And people don't seem to realize this when they stick a blue and yellow equal sign on their backpack, or change their profile picture to a little red graphic, and then go "Well! I've done my part for the gays!"

And now, the point of all of this, which you are probably wondering about by now. People have a duty to society to educate themselves. To ask questions. To take a step back and think about what's going on in the world around them, and do their research, before blindly following leaders. I didn't mean to go all angry radical feminist queer on everyone but this is a pretty good example of what i'm talking about. We can only do so much to educate others, at some point people have to take initiative and figure out the meaning behind the information they receive, and what to do with it once it's in their heads.

That said, here's a link if you want to read more about what I was talking about in this post. Educate yourselves!

Is Poverty a Choice?

Poverty comes in many forms. And, there are many reasons for poverty. Some people fall into poverty because of lack of education, or lack of opportunities. Others are forced into poverty because of disabilities. There are a very small number of people who, yes, choose to become poor, and choose to stay poor, and are fully aware of what they're doing. The people of Southie are good example of a group of people who may appear to outsiders to be "choosing" their poverty. It looks like they're not trying. But it appears to me that a lot of the people in Southie and in other areas like it don't even really know what they're doing. They don't think of themselves as "poor", and they're not ready to accept that status. They turn their heads away from what ius going on around them and continue to label their neighborhood as "the best place in the world". Who would want to leave the best place in the world?
I think that this mindset is fairly common, especially in white working class neighborhoods like Southie. Most people don't choose poverty. If they appear to do so, it's probably because they don't think of themselves as in poverty.
The thing about getting out of poverty is that it means first acknowledging that you're lower on the ladder than almost everyone else, and that can be a pretty tough thing to do for a lot of people.

Malcolm X (chapters 1-12)

In the first half of the book we see Malcolm X go through a huge transformation. In prison he is uneducated. He is angry, but his anger needs direction. Then, something happens. He starts reading. He reads! He starts with copying words out of the dictionary, and then moves on to the history books. In reading this history, he learns more about his people and the great injustices that have occurred against them. This is what gives his anger direction and gives him the ability to become a completely different man.
Later, speaking of this experiences, Malcolm describes it as more valuable than any college education. I think that for him this is true. In prison he had far less distractions than he would have in college. Also, he could focus in on what was important to him. Any college he would have been attending would not have held lectures on the crimes of white people against other races, or the true history of the american slave, or any of the other things Malcolm X was most interested in finding out about. He would have been most likely taught a curriculum that was set out for him by a white man. He says that his "alma mater was books". Books are a really viable form of education that can teach you valuable things that you wouldn't be learning about otherwise.
Not that everybody should chose the education of a prison library over college, but in some instances self-education through a medium such as books with little distractions like those present on a college campus can be the best method.

King: Still King?

The short answer is yes. King is still king. Or rather, he should be. There is still a great need in our society for people like MLK who are willing to fight against racism. Some people have this crazy notion that we are living in a "post-racial" society. Honestly, nothing makes me angrier than that idea. I think most of the people using the term "post-racial" are privileged people who benefit either indirectly or directly from the racism still very present in society, and see no reason to change it. 

It almost seems like after Malcolm X died, after King died, after the civil rights act was passed, people stopped fighting. Not that there aren't people fighting, but it isn't on as massive a scale as it needs to be. Race is still an issue. The blase attitude towards racist has gotten worse as time has gone on. We're in a new millenium, we don't need to worry about race anymore, right? Or you know, it's not really an issue anymore. Or it's not as bad as it was a long time ago. You can tell that to the millions of people in this country still facing race-related discrimination as violence. 

I think it can be easy for a lot of people, especially white people who are blinded by our privilege  to put on this air with regards to race that it's something that's already been dealt with. But it's not. We need people like King still. We need them now more than ever to show everybody that the war hasn't been won yet.