Innocence and the weight of events

In La Peste Camus returns to the theme of individual revolt at the heart of his pre-war works in order to track the emergence of an ethic which, by encompassing the collective, would be in a position to respond to recent upheavals. Reading La Peste (1947) in the light of L’Étranger (1942) shows that, while the proposed solutions point to a break, both novels had to confront the same key existential issue, namely individual freedom when impacted by events.