The Suffering in Camus and Solzhenitsyn

There are two worlds that people live in, the real and the unreal. The unreal is a world full of stories, a person’s personal getaway. Most people read novels to try to escape the real world, to leave reality behind and the unbearable aspects of it, such as anger, fear and hurt. However the unreal world is relatively close to the real world and can take the traveler by surprise. All humans have experienced physical and mental pain, but the character never realizes that the characters in the novels are humans too. The authors of these novels are writing about what they know, conflict and human suffering. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life Ivan Denisovich and Albert Camus’ The Plague are perfect examples of the capacity of human suffering in society. Both authors try to portray the distress and torture a person can feel, although the situations are quite extreme the emotions and lessons that need to be learned are the same.

Early in One Day in the Life Ivan Denisovich we are shown that Ivan suffers physically and mentally. The concentration camp no

and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I

The life in the camp lead Ivan to suffer greatly from dawn to dusk. Nonetheless this suffering also leads him to try to survive, to conquer the human suffering and at the end of the day he did not feel sick anymore. This is one of the purposes of human suffering among many others.

Camus knew this and in his novel The Plague it was made evident. In the beginning, the efforts of the inhabitants to fight the individual battles against the plague, but to know avail are described. People continue to suffer and lose their loved ones. Out of desperation, small volunteer groups evolve to fight the plague as a team and not as individuals. The Plague tells is a story of fight not against the disease, but against the indifference in the face of human suffering. Every character in the story responds to the catastrophe in their own way and this reaches to the heart of existentialism, thus it is actions that truly define a man. As the plague slowly takes control of the city of Oran. There is confusion everywhere, no one understands what has hit them but in their selfish pursuits the citizens turn a blind eye to accept the inhumanity of the situation. They try to cling onto the lives as they have always lived. Hence the struggle against the plague begins with individuals. It takes a lot of time for them to understand that an epidemic is something that affects one and all.

The Plague is a novel that has a little bit of a religious perspective on human suffering. Father Paneloux’s first sermon expressed very little sympathy or understanding for the townspeople’s suffering. He claims the plague is what they deserved, and that suffering is God’s way of punishing sinners. Dr. Rieux’s belief is that anyone who has dealt with human beings in pain will want to get in there and relieve their suffering, not sit back and preach about it.

The Plague is about love, exile, and suffering as illuminated by living around death. What is the meaning of life? For many, that question is an abstraction except in the context of being aware of losing some of the joys of life, or life itself. The scenes alternate between clarifying the main themes in the context of the physical plague and the e

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