Pandemic As Metaphor: Reading Ecofascism Through Albert Camus’s The Plague

Abstract

The aim of this article is to read Albert Camus’s The Plague through the lens of emerging ecofascism in the years following the COVID-19. The article will henceforth navigate the ways in which fiction with specific reference to Albert Camus’s The Plague has been an anchorage to understand the world as it goes through a time of raging COVID-19 and the resultant social and emotional dislocation. It tries to chart out the role of fiction to cope with horrors of pandemic and to understand the underlying problems in a globalized worldview, both literally as well as metaphorically. Finally, the paper will also examine the ways work of art, especially fiction, helps mankind to underpin empathetic and psychological bonding in isolation during the times of a pandemic and ecofascism.