The Plague by Albert Camus
Part Two brings the characters together and shows you their individual responses to the plague. In Part Three, the plague wreaks its greatest havoc, taking as its victims much of the town while being indiscriminate. In Part Four, the town starts to become victorious and the plague seems to be on the decline. However, in Part Five, it strikes its final blow by killing Tarrou just as the gates of Oran are about to be opened. In the end, Dr. Rieux struggles with his feelings of happiness that the plague has been temporarily defeated and his sadness over losing both his wife and his friend Tarrou.
Miriam Webster gives several definitions of the word plague, all of which are applicable in this novel – “a disastrous evil or affliction; a destructively numerous influx; an epidemic disease causing a high rate of mortality; a cause of irritation; a sudden unwelcome outbreak.: In the context of bioethics, however, the plague can be something natural, something done to your own person, or something done to another.
Camus shows the plague as a “disastrous evil or affliction” that is also an irrational and depersonalized evil. The plague, in this sense, is both physical and spiritual. While it causes sickness and death, it also causes exile, separation and isolation as people are cordoned off and quarantined. At the same time, those who turn to the church for solace find none as Father Paneloux initially preaches that the plague is actually a punishment from God for their sins. As the novel continues and Father Paneloux sees the indiscriminate nature of the plague, even he begins to question his beliefs.
Camus also shows the plague as a very literal meaning – “an epidemic disease causing a high rate of mortality.” The rats that carried and spread the disease to humans were dying in such large quantities that they had to be removed by trucks several times per day. There was a very small window of opportunity to try and get the situation under control, which was missed because the Prefect didn’t want to cause alarm and didn’t want to affect the business and tourism of the town. When the disease spread to humans, the death toll was so high that factories had to be turned into crematories just to dispose of the bodies in a timely fashion.
Perhaps the most interesting definition of plague, in the context of this book, was the “cause of irritation.” Citizens of Oran were annoyed by the rats coming out to die in the streets. When they started becoming ill themselves, it was that very same irritation that they felt on the part of not being able to participate in their daily routine. They didn’t look at the whole picture, the steadily rising number of deaths per day, until it directly affected them.
The characters in the novel are as realistic and complex as anyone might meet in real life. Dr. Rieux, for example, is a tireless worker and struggles for the cause of wiping out the epidemic that has set itself on Oran. While he treats his patients, including those who cannot afford his services, he overlooks the very person that he promised to look after in sickness and health – his wife. He leads a very lonely life once he sends his wife to a sanitarium, however, he is one who lives his life in the extreme of deficiency. He sees things in a very black and white manner and hardly allows himself to commiserate with the people he is treating. It is in this detachment from humanity that one can find his fault. Rambert goes so far as to liken Rieux to Louis Saint0Just, who was an extremist in the French Revolution and who has been described as having “a brain of fire, and a heart of ice.”
Tarrou, whose journal was extensively woven into the fabric of the novel, devoted his life to fighting against the death penalty, which in the context of Oran seems ironic. His greatest ability came in the form of being able to organize and motivate people, and he applied this in Oran by creating a core group of volunteers to help fight the plague. Tarrou as a whole seems to be good-natured and he inspires trust in people; Cottard trusts him with his personal history and even Rieux forms a deep friendship with him. But Tarrou is a man committed to his ideals, except in the case of his parents. His actions toward them appear ruthless and his leaving with no explanation, cruel.
Rambert is a character who has shown the most change and growth in this novel. He came to Oran to write an article on the sanitary measures of the Arabs (which is easily overlooked as Camus tends to push the European aspects of the town). Once the gates of Oran are closed, Rambert finds that he is trapped and separated from his wife in Paris. His initial vice is selfishness, as he tries everything he can to escape the town so he can get back home to his wife, ignoring the very real possibility that he may further spread the epidemic. However, a shift comes when Rambert realizes that he is needed in the town and decides to stay and help fight the plague. In the end, he is rewarded by surviving the plague and being reunited with his wife.
The two main philosophers that came to mind while reading this novel were Kant and Aristotle. The Prefect’s decision to not close the town sooner showed that he was treating the citizens in his charge as an end only, not as a means. This is in direct opposition to Kantian philosophy. The stress on the individual conflicts brought to light the virtues and vices of each character, which is obviously a throwback to Aristotle’s principles on the matter.
Overall, Camus took a complex subject and broke it down into its various parts. Writing through Rieux made the book very dry, technical and sanitized. I could almost smell the latex gloves and rubbing alcohol as I turned the pages. I understand his desire to give a detached description of the events in Oran, but by using a character so imbued in the technical and analytical side of the issue, it is devoid of a lot of the human emotion on the part of the victims.
Rieux discusses one case of quarantine where he touches on the verbal aspect of the mother begging him not to take her child, but the book itself never touches on the emotional aspect of how that must have felt for the people involved. While Camus does go into some detail on some of the main characters, he focuses on their sense of loss for the people who are not in Oran with them, but not on the losses they face in the town itself, losses to the epidemic. Michael, the first victim, is simply replaced the next time the reader finds themself walking through the lobby of Rieux’s building.
Camus used interesting elements to draw the reader into the town and try to make them empathize. The heat, heavy rains, strong, hot, humid winds were not only signs of the physical oppression experienced by citizens of Oran, but were symbolic as well. The themes in the story ran the gamut from suffering (and the human effort to forge solidarity to counteract it) to the values of human life, giving up habits and even love.
In researching Camus, I came across some background information that lead me to draw other parallels as well. Camus was born and spent most of his life in Algiers during the French occupation. In the 1940s, the Nazis seized control of France and that trickled down to its colonies as well. The Resistance of the French people against the Nazis and even the Algerian people against the French occupants is a direct correlation to the plage/disease of the novel. This novel is imbued with the pessimism of the French people at the peak of Naziism in 1943.
