Conclusion

After a brief discussion of the antiwar perspectives of Wilfred Owens, the English poet killed in World War I, and Ron Kovic, the Vietnam Veteran for Peace, this chapter transitions from the connections between gender and war to the challenges to those linkages by such peace advocates as Cindy Sheehan and the peace encampments at Greenham Common and Seneca. Extracting from their defiance an emphasis on empathy and solidarity, the rest of the chapter focuses on Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague. By highlighting the ways that specific characters and situations in the novel enact particular forms of solidarity, we are led to conclude how empathy and solidarity are essential to preventing the degradation of our humanity in the shadow of war.