Pandemic and Literature: A Saga of Human Survival

Abstract

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. (Camus 18) These prophetic words of Camus very well indicates the process of acceptance to an ongoing pandemic. Here, he describes the human tendency to react towards any unacceptable situation and the way people try to live initially in an imagined normalcy, trying to pretend as if nothing has changed till the time when inevitably they have to confront the dire reality that nothing has remained as it used to be…