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Abstract

This paper analyzes Albert Camus’ the Plague (1946) and its criticism of the anthropocentric and capitalist society through the lens of ecocriticism. The novel depicts the imaginary city of Oran, a port in Algeria, where the city environment encounters an unknown problem that ends up hitting the city with a lethal plague. The study is especially informed by ecocritical ideas of Lawrence Buell and Cheryl Glotfelty to analyze the outbreak of the pandemic as an ecological crisis. Based on ecocriticism, nature and literature- as a cultural product- are interrelated to the extent that some theorists find nature more of a linguistic and cultural construction than a void space filled with landscapes, animals and plants. Thus, it is assumed that an ecological crisis like the spread of pandemic is not only effected in as a result of human activities in disrupt natural order or ecosystem, but equally through his mindset about nature. Also, the present study foregrounds the idea that the understanding of nature assisted by its representations determine how we make sense of and deal with the sufferings of pandemic. Consequently, the literary text here will be examined on the basis of two main questions: (1) How is nature represented in the novel? and (2) How our environmental images inform our responses to the pandemic? It is noteworthy that Camus’ narrative looks upon the environment beyond a setting or a backdrop for the plot. The findings show that in The Plague there is some sense of environment as a process rather than as a constant or given is implicit in the text. This makes the fiction to be classified as an environmental text. This result, regarding the relationship of natural world with human life in Camus’ works, is in accordance with earlier researches that have understood his works as the topographical staging of perpetual struggle between the natural universe and the world of human. However, it does not mean that the narrative offers a homogenous straightforward advocating of nature, but rather a complex view about the environment including sympathy for the environment as well as examples of distinctions between human and nonhuman.