42 pages • 1 hour read
Albert CamusThe Plague
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Engagement in the Face of Injustice: Acts and Words
Throughout the novel Camus utilizes Oran’s events, characters, and setting to underscore his stance toward human existence and individual responsibility. As a novelist, essayist, and philosopher living in Paris during and after World War II, Camus became part of (though later repudiated) the postwar existentialist cultural and philosophical movement, which places utmost significance in the freedom at the core of human existence—hence humanism as its precursor. Deeming this individual freedom foundational in all other values, existentialism addresses facets of modern life that humans face, such as angst, boredom, isolation, nothingness, terror, and the absurd. With each person forced to confront these components of life—itself intrinsically absurd—the only option for the existentialist is to act at all costs. For the existentialist, human essence isn’t innate; rather, it’s constructed through a lifetime of choices informing one’s personal actions.
In The Plague disease and quarantine push every character to make choices regarding crucial issues. Rieux, in following with his profession, chooses dutiful service in the public sphere over personal considerations, like nurturing his wife’s declining health. Tarrou, having left home at a young age, chooses a solitary, nomadic life, which affords him the freedom to fight murder and death wherever he goes. Paneloux’s actions follow his strict adherence to an underlying faith in God’s will, and Rambert the love-driven individualist eventually decides to table his personal pleasures to join the collective fight. Grand, though older and of questionable health, also joins the sanitary squad, as does Othon, just prior to his death. Cottard, on the other hand, chooses to benefit from public calamity, and the old asthmatic, having opted to take to his bed at age 50, chooses to spend his life shuffling peas.
From the novel’s onset on, the narrator not only underscores Oran’s odd geographical positioning, ever-changing weather, and rapidly-spreading disease—elements residing outside of human control, and which greatly affect the community—but he also intersperses highly descriptive passages detailing them and the confrontation with the absurd they present. However, that people are powerless to tame the plague, the weather, and the natural world doesn’t mean they should give in; even if a battle can’t be won, and even with an indifferent sky looming above, one must always fight evil. Individuals can and must take action by whatever means possible if they are to live in authenticity.
During World War II, Camus was editor-in-chief of Combat, a clandestine French newspaper supporting the French Resistance. In The Plague all the major characters—with the exception of Cottard—join the sanitary squad, whose work demonstrates a collective stance of action. Those same actively engaged characters also devote themselves to writing texts, the composition and mechanics of which play a prominent role in the narrative. By emphasizing his characters’ collective commitment to “finding the right words”—despite language’s inadequacy as a means of communication—Camus demonstrates that resistance can take other forms than fighting in the streets and asserts that all forms of resistance are valid. By choosing the path of literary engagement, the novel’s heroes display their efforts to challenge the all-pervasive evil embodied in the plague.
The Inadequacy of Religion in a Suffering World
The novel presents a portrait of human suffering in its depiction of Oranians’ experience with the plague. As a doctor cognizant of medicine’s limitations, Rieux attempts to assuage his patients’ physical pain. In his capacity as priest, Paneloux seeks to explain and justify the mass suffering that has struck Oran, a city of nonbelievers. When pestilence overtakes the city, Paneloux blames his congregation for the scourge, citing their apathy toward God and infrequent mass attendance as sins for which God has sent plague to the community. After the death of Othon’s young son, Paneloux again addresses his congregants, exhorting them to move beyond grief and take a blind leap of faith, an act that involves accepting the suffering and death of the innocent as God’s will.
Within the scope of the novel, Paneloux’s stance—and that of organized religion as a whole—proves fundamentally inadequate as a belief system in that it essentially equates to dogma. In presenting his congregants with a doctrine that purports to be all-encompassing and all-explaining yet bears little to no bearing on reality, the priest leaves no room for “imagination,” a quality often perceived by the narrator as lacking in humanity. With local conditions growing more dire by the day, residents realize that Paneloux’s all-or-nothing proposition offers very little in tangible terms; on the contrary, it promotes blind acceptance of the status quo. Rather than rekindle their already tenuous faith, the priest’s pleas push his congregants to seek solace and explanation in superstition, considered by many as ignorant, given its adherence to unprovable claims. Ironically, the version of religion that Paneloux lays out and follows doesn’t seem too distinct from the irrationality of superstition.
As Paneloux grows ill, he maintains his dogmatic stance, refusing medical intervention to avoid interfering with God’s will. Rather than try to fight death, he passively submits to it. In the end, his death—not of plague, but of a mysterious, unidentifiable ailment—underscores the erosion, inapplicability, and ineffectuality of Paneloux’s belief system in a world steeped in suffering.
Not entirely dissimilar from Paneloux’s approach, Rieux’s fight-at-all-costs stance also represents an all-or-nothing way of thinking. Contrary to the priest, however, Rieux doesn’t speak and point fingers: He acts. Moreover, given his atheism, he chooses to act precisely because he believes that someone must do so in the absence of God.
Community, Solidarity, and “Common Decency”
Under quarantine, Oran’s habit-driven residents, accustomed to blindly going about their business, find their lives upended. Sealed off from the outside world, the city becomes a microcosm unto itself. Beyond its status as event in the novel, plague functions as a metaphor bringing to the fore the question of community: What do people living “in the same boat” owe each other? How can people break free from an us-versus-them mentality and learn to look beyond their individual desires to rally together for the collective good?
Debates on and around these questions unfold as the characters discuss the philosophies informing their choices. A doctor’s very profession reflects a commitment to public service; in Rieux’s case, however, the obligation to always act for the common good extends beyond the bounds of medical principles. Rieux’s duty to society is so foundational to his core that he neglects illness in his domestic sphere—his wife’s chronic condition—to perform his public duties. Rambert, on the other hand, finds personal value in love. He invokes the mathematical “whole equals sum of parts” logic, claiming that if all individuals in a given society are fulfilled, then the collective whole is happy. Placing his love for his wife above all else, he strives to escape from Oran, where he doesn’t feel he belongs given that he’s only there on assignment. Tarrou, also a visitor in Oran, never questions his presence there during quarantine. So strong is his sense of solidarity with suffering Oranians that he unflinchingly risks his life to fight against plague. Furthermore, he promotes community solidarity by forming the sanitary squad, whose mission eventually wins over Rambert, Paneloux, and Othon. As the novel’s antihero, Cottard refrains from joining the collective fight and asserts his adherence to individualism by devising a scheme to profit on community suffering.
During a discussion among Rieux, Tarrou, and Rambert, the journalist upholds his belief in the primacy of love for a person, which stands in contradistinction to the doctor’s principle of love for the plurality of people and Tarrou’s principle of love for an idea. At Rambert’s accusation that Rieux is simply “playing the hero” (81), the doctor categorically rejects any hint of heroism at the root of his convictions, opining that “the only means of righting a plague is, common decency” (81). The sheer force of Rieux’s remarks—along with Rambert’s upon learning that the doctor has placed the community’s needs above his ill wife’s—convinces the journalist to walk the path of solidarity by assisting the squad.
Camus’s treatment of these discourses underscores his belief in the power of personal actions in the face of injustice. No matter how high evil looms, individuals must act, even if their actions appear trivial and ineffectual. Moreover, injustice finds its antidote not in overblown heroism—whose grandiosity often stems from the ego—but in simple acts of kindness and devotion to a common cause.
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