The Plague

The novel opens on a note of mystery, with the words of an unidentified omniscient third-person narrator, who reveals himself to be Rieux near the end of the work. Rieux begins by establishing the story’s setting. Given his insider status as a key figure in the events he has transcribed, the narrator claims to be well-equipped to describe Oran’s struggle with a plague outbreak in the 1940s.

He paints Oran in highly unflattering terms, deeming it an unremarkable city “without pigeons, without any trees or gardens” (1), known for its “violent extremes of temperature” (2). With their port city sitting atop a plateau facing away from the stunning bay below, Oran’s residents pay no heed to that asset—the sea—as they go about their mundane, habit-driven lives, which they devote primarily to accumulating enough wealth to fund their pursuit of fleeting pleasures.

Given the novel’s title, it’s clear that the dead rat Rieux discovers on his landing at the narrative’s onset foreshadows the plague that will overwhelm Oran. That the concierge Michel denies the existence of rats in the building and subsequently succumbs to the plague presages the populace’s—especially the local officials, whose job is to manage public health crises—overall stance toward the impending catastrophe: They remain obstinately blind in their disavowal of what is transpiring before their eyes. The rats symbolize a somber side of human nature, and they also introduce the theme of the absurd that Camus explores throughout the work.

While Camus indisputably establishes Rieux’s centrality in The Plague as the work’s protagonist as well as its chronicler and narrator, his manner of developing Rieux’s character veers from traditional character portrayals. Rather than providing a physical portrait of the man, Camus focuses on Rieux’s inner qualities and his actions as an attentive local doctor faced with a mounting health crisis in his community. Only halfway through Part 1 does the narrative provide a physical description of Rieux, and the narrator displaces this description to the pen of Tarrou, who has inked a succinct list of Rieux’s physical traits in his notebook. Ultimately, what matters about this protagonist lies less in his outward appearance and more in his core beliefs translated into action; in this sense, Rieux embodies tenets of engagement, another theme in the novel.

Not unlike the unnamed narrator, other characters introduced in Part 1 carry a mysterious air that contributes to the aura of the unknown regarding the disease; though it can be scientifically ascertained that plague originates from fleas living on rats, its definitive origin remains a mystery. Rieux’s established asthma patient never leaves his bed, where his sole inexplicable activity consists of transferring peas from one container to another. Tarrou, a visitor of undisclosed provenance who has come to Oran for unknown reasons, spends his time observing and inscribing Oran’s goings-on in his notebooks. Joseph Grand, an ostensibly ordinary civil servant, devotes his leisure time to a mysterious side project of great import to him, and his neighbor Cottard, having committed an unmentioned past crime, has just attempted suicide.

While the narrator tends to adhere to a matter-of-fact, journalistic style of writing to ensure his claims of objectivity, he nevertheless delves frequently into details, in particular regarding sensory stimuli. For example, as Rieux climbs up “foul-smelling stairs” to meet Grand, the two men go to find Cottard, whose breathing is punctuated by “little squeals of rats” (9). These details paint a picture of Cottard’s dubious character, foreshadowing his disreputable dealings during quarantine and his ultimate downfall. At times sensory details take on a highly descriptive tone. For example, as signs of a plague grow ever more apparent, the narrator writes:

The clang of an unseen streetcar came through the window, briskly refuting cruelty and pain. Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world (20).

Once again, sensory details propel the plot’s momentum, as the clanging streetcars will later be used to carry corpses to the crematorium and the ever-present sea lying behind the city whispers truths of impending instability to residents’ deaf ears.

The narrator also paints intricate descriptions of the weather which, along with the sea and other aspects of nature, serves as a primary force in advancing the narrative. For example, the day after Michel—the plague’s first victim—passes away, the weather takes a downward plunge, with dark skies portending torrential rains and humidity. Accompanied by changes in the water, whose “dark-blue translucency” and “steely or silvery glints” (15) test the onlooker’s vision, Oran’s meteorological status looms large in the city’s collective conscious, as a police officer chalks up the mounting death toll as somehow related to the vicissitudes of the weather.

From Part 1 onward, writing and language play a primary role in The Plague. With most of the characters involved in penning a text of some genre, Camus presents characters taking on various roles of self-expression for personal reasons. Throughout the work the narrator refers to language in marked detail; for example, in Grand’s apartment Rieux notes a chalkboard with “two half-obliterated words: ‘flowery avenues’” (16), and when Dr. Castel remarks that all signs of Oran’s mysterious disease point at plague, the narrator emphasizes the term itself, noting that “the word ‘plague’ had just been uttered for the first time” (18). Despite ongoing attempts to capture reality with words, the theme of humans’ communicative ineptitude repeatedly arises in the narrative. For instance, Grand remains in a lowly job due to his “inability to find the right words” (23), and during the meeting with local doctors and city officials, the men bicker over what they should officially call the disease. Rieux, visibly frustrated, stresses that the words employed to designate the malady matter significantly less than the actions that must be taken to stem its spread.

The novel stresses that, often to the detriment of society, the voice of authority—of those with the power to dictate public policy—often prevails, both because it seeks to avoid disrupting the norm and because it communicates to people what they want to hear. In The Plague this voice emerges through the press, which plays a sizeable role in Oranians’ lives. Rather than observe with their own eyes what is happening around them, Oranians rush out to buy daily newspapers, which publish only the articles permitted by city officials—in essence, very limited versions of reality. When officials can no longer deny the statistics indicating an epidemic, the Prefect transmits orders to close Oran as its citizens go about their daily activities, still in full denial.