Red Dragon vs. The Plague

A Bridge of Ideas

Your profound appreciation for how characters like Hannibal Lecter and Dr. Rieux are shaped by their circumstances, as you noted with Lecter's "terrible childhood, because of other people!" and Rieux's survival amidst loss, reveals a shared intellectual architecture. Both books, despite their vastly different genres, engage with the core Camusian concept of existential resilience and the profound impact of external forces on the individual psyche, creating a powerful, albeit unexpected, bridge in your reading experience.