Amid the feverish horror of rampant disease and death, The Plague is a parable of human distance and the struggle to share existence. By studying the relationships that Camus exposes, the relationship between man and lover, mother and child, healer and sick person, one can see that the only relationship Camus describes is that between the exile and the kingdom he seeks with tormented desire. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay “So the first thing the plague brought to our city was exile.” (p.71). The first exile that Camus writes about is the physical exile of a sick city from the world and, consequently, the exile of the city's people from the realm of everyday life. The particular torture of this exile is memory; once expelled from a kingdom, the kingdom ceases to exist, living only as "a memory that serves no purpose... it taste[s] only of regret." (p.73). Thus the city's inhabitants are haunted by memories of their distant loved ones and their interrupted lives, creating islands of their own exile, an exile intensified by years of monotonous selfish habit. “The truth is that everyone gets bored and busy cultivating habits.”(p.4). The counter is the ultimate representation of this exile; he is completely detached from the reality of man, measuring his life in the perpetual repetition of an absurd activity. Through the character of Rambert, Camus defines the plague as precisely this selfish exile of habit, this doing "...the same thing over and over and over..." (p.161). The exile is further compounded by the desperation with which many characters throw themselves into the quest of attempting to regain their personal remembered kingdoms. Rambert, the visiting journalist, is the most obvious example; literally trying to escape the city in exile, he makes mad efforts to return to his realm of romantic love, though he ultimately comes to realize that selfishness makes this realm empty. Grand, exiled due to his inarticulability, continually seeks to end his isolation by completing his manuscript; unfortunately he never gets to finish the first sentence. An anonymous, plague-stricken madman rushes into the street and embraces the first woman he sees, trying to escape from the terrible isolation of the selfish, trying to share his exile. The kingdoms these citizens seek to reconquer never existed, and they suffer in the deepest and most desperate exile of man from man. The exile and kingdom of which Father Paneloux preaches is the exile of man from the Garden. The plague now becomes a plague of the soul, a punishment of evil, a manifestation of Divine Wrath. In the sermon of the first Week of Prayer, Paneloux warns that "God has... struck down those who hardened themselves against Him..." (p.95). At the time of this sermon, Father Paneloux "...has not yet come into contact with death; that is why he can speak so confidently of the truth..." (p.126). Over the course of the year following this first sermon, Paneloux descends from his pulpit into the depths of true human suffering, joining Rieux in his campaign against the plague. It is in this period, after witnessing the heartbreaking and prolonged death of a child, that Paneloux finally departs from the kingdom of humanity, climbing back into his pulpit, placing himself in exile on the path to the kingdom of humanity. God. At the time of the Second Week of Prayer sermon, Father Paneloux took his view of the plague to a level of radicalism. Reasoning that God's will must be embraced as one's own, he denounces resistance against the plague as heresy. With strange irony, he tells the story of a bishop who exiles himself in an ancient time of plague only to have corpses "rain[ed] upon his.