camus

On Hugo's Last Day of a Condemned Man

May 11, 2019 in literature, philosophy

Victor Hugo witnessed the workings of the guillotine at first hand. More than once, in fact, he found himself among crowds of curious, expectant, agitated, hate-filled people awaiting a show of death. Much disgusted and angered by the twisted joy that people seemed to take in it—by the distinct ugliness of the spectacle—he decided to write a book against the death penalty. Apparently, it was the day after Hugo had strolled past an executioner casually preparing the guillotine for its next victim at the Place de l'Hotel de Ville, that he began writing The Last Day of a Condemned Man, which Dostoevsky would consider "absolutely the most real and truthful of everything that Hugo wrote." .

Perfectionism and Absurd Creation: Joseph Grand in Camus's The Plague

April 28, 2019 in literature, existentialism, absurdism

Albert Camus's novel The Plague, published in 1947, centers on the French-Algerian city of Oran, where thousands of rats are found dead in the streets. At first, only a few inhabitants take notice of this strange event—but soon, as the plague rushes through the city and begins to kill people, too, the nature and meaning of the disease can no longer be ignored. The Plague is probably my favorite novel by Camus; it ranks with other great existentialist/philosophical works of fiction, like Kafka's Trial, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Sartre's Nausea, Dazai's No Longer Human, Malraux's Man's Fate, and so on.