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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.
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