خود-آفرینی یا همبستگی اجتماعی؟: مطالعه تطبیقی بین رمان طاعون و داستان نگران نباش

This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to compare Albert Camus’s The Plague and Mahsa Mohebali’s Don’t Worry. The study posits that one of the points of convergence between these two narratives lies in their existentialist themes of crisis. Both texts are set against the backdrop of a critical situation: the events of Camus’s novel unfold in a "plague-stricken city," while those of Mohebali’s story take place in an "earthquake-stricken city." The plague and the earthquake carry symbolic dimensions, representing an existential crisis at the core of the city/world. As one of Camus’s characters remarks, everyone carries the plague within themselves, just as in Don’t Worry, the earthquake is not in the ground but in the minds of people. Both the plague and the earthquake symbolize the relationship between humanity and the world. According to Camus, the external world/city remains indifferent and silent to our meanings, rendering human efforts futile. Absurdity, in Camus’s view, is both a term for the fundamental state of a dying world and a name for the futility of human struggle to overcome this fundamental reality. The title Don’t Worry from the outset hints at an existential anxiety in the face of this indifference and resistance of the world. The contemporary individual no longer recognizes themselves in the city; human signs and meanings have been erased from its face. In Don’t Worry, reactions such as suicide, addiction, fleeing the city, and escapism point to this alienation between humans and the world, stemming from a kind of passive nihilism: the impossibility of decision-making. In the absence of moral heroes, Shadi (the protagonist) feels as though Jean Reno (a Hollywood actor) is watching her, as if she lives for those imaginary eyes. The characters in Don’t Worry have failed to break free from the myth of heroism and engage in struggle or resistance. Thus, while in Camus’s novel, the plague as a "shared fate" evokes a sense of solidarity, the characters in Mohebali’s story are trapped in an atomized and passive individuality: the simultaneous absence of self-creation and social solidarity.