The Child

During Mr. Shapiro’s lecture he was talking about filters created through life experience. As we grow and learn our filters become more complex, clouded. The filters affect more and more how we see and experience the world around us. However, children, without life experience an understanding of society and the guidelines it imposes, possess the clearest filters. Nothing affects how they perceive or experience the world around them. They possess no bias with which to view events, no pre-existing guidelines to compare anything too. Their perception of the world is completely honest and pure. This is why watching the child suffer so deeply affected everyone present: Grand, Tarrou, Dr. Rieux, Dr. Castel, and Paneloux (the priest). They have dealt with thousands upon thousands of deaths – they are viewed as every day occurrences. And death by the plague, as they all know, is never pleasant. People suffer before they die – often for long periods of time. However, watching the child suffer affected them in ways watching no other death had. Watching the tortured death of the child affected him so because this child is the embodiment of innocence. As other patients lie dying, and have accepted their imminent death as a result of the knowledge of the fatality of the plague, the child lacks this knowledge. The child knows only one thing – a fight for survival, the most primal instinct. An instinct the other sufferers are not affected with because it has been overridden as a result of their knowledge of the plague – instead of fight they give in to it. The child fights with everything he has, and watching him fight the plague and loose is unbearable to all present.