Epidemics, lockdowns, and hypocrisy: The case of simulated reality

Abstract

Abstract There are many representations of disease outbreaks or epidemics in creative literature. However, scholarship on the representation of disease outbreaks or epidemics in literary studies is scarce. This paper derives from the preceding lacuna and engages the place of disease and epidemic discourse from the literary point of view. We argue that African societies have survived several epidemics in the past, including lockdowns and quarantines by engaging works that have demonstrated an understanding of the causes, courses, and impacts of epidemics in a simulated environment as obtainable in the fictional works of literature. Through a close reading of events, setting, characterization and plot in Albert Camus s The Plague and Ola Rotimi s The Gods are not to Blame, this research foregrounds the themes of knowledge, struggle, ignorance, nihilism, unity, and resilience, as well as lessons from how African societies in fictional works survive epidemics. Moreover, with narrative strategies like the omniscient narrator, flashback, allusion, compressed metaphors, songs, and rhetorical devices, the artistic representation of the causes and impacts of disease outbreaks in both traditional and modern societies are compared. The knowledge that epidemics are a reoccurring decimal in human existence should guide policymakers to a clear long-term plan to handle outbreaks.