The Plague | Literary Precedents
Camus's account of the plague recalls classical and modern sources, among them Thucydides' History of Peloponnesian Wars (c.431-400 B.C.), Sophocles' Oedipus the King (c. 429 B.C.), the book of Exodus in the Bible, Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). Germaine Bree sees a more immediate source in Antonin Artaud's Le Theatre et son double, where the plague is a concrete symbol of spiritual illness. The question of the suffering of innocent children is an echo of Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov. Throughout,...
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