© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi � �. ��63/9789004�9�697_0�7 Ethics, Meaning, and the Absurd in Elie Wiesel’s The Trial of God and Albert Camus’s The Plague Ingrid Anderson Abstract Although rarely examined together, Elie Wiesel’s The Trial of God and Albert Camus’ The Plague are distinct, but philosophically related projects. Both respond to the moral cri- sis that culminated in widespread fascism and genocide in Europe prior to and during World War II by claiming that humanity must struggle against absurdity to make its own meaning, even in the face of profound and meaningless suffering. This essay argues that without such meaning, there can be no truly shared, universal ethics. Wiesel and Camus successfully make a similar claim not by asserting the world has become absurd, but by claiming that it has always been absurd. Both assert that we can ease human suf- fering by adopting an ethics that operates in spite of the constant uncertainty caused by absurdity. I want to blaspheme, and I can’t quite manage it. I go up against Him, I shake my fist, I froth with rage, but it’s still a way of telling Him that He’s there, that He exists . . . that denial itself is an offering to His grandeur.1 Elie Wiesel The final conclusion of the absurd is, in fact, the rejection of suicide and the maintenance of that desperate confrontation of human interrogation and the silence of the world.2 Albert Camus 1  Elie Wiesel, The Town Beyond the Wall, trans. Steven Becker (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 123. 2  Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower, (New York: Vintage, 1956) 16. When I refer to the absurd in this essay, I am utilizing Camus’s definition of the absurd as articulated in this quote. Simply put, the absurd is that which reminds us that, despite our need for meaning, human experience often defies categories that provide us with meaning, especially when the actions of our fellow man refute our sense of the ethical without compunction. The image of humanity struggling against the weight of the unexplained, the unethical, and the meaning- less in spite of the “silence of the world” is, I believe, crucial to understanding both Camus and Wiesel as absurdists. 340-358_Zank_F17.indd 340 1/22/2015 7:20:10 PM