The Plague

“The local press, so lavish of the news about the rats, now had nothing to say. For rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.”

One of the work’s numerous references to the press, this passage emphasizes the extent to which Oran’s primary source of public information often misleads the public. When diseased rats first run rampant in the city, newspapers heavily report their presence; however, now that the novelty of this news event translates into human death, the press, uninterested in sharing public events likely to cause widespread panic—and ultimately controlled by city authorities—backs off from notifying residents of the incipient epidemic.

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.” 

Not only does this passage speak to the atemporal and ubiquitous nature of plagues, but it also underscores the reality that people tend to react to a mass epidemic as if it has descended ex nihilo upon them. Also, with war grouped together with plague, the passage establishes the framework for understanding Oran’s plague as an allegory for the advent of Nazi Germany during World War II.

“Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.” 

This sentence describes the residents of Oran—Rieux included—as being surprised by the plague’s descent and also blinded by their inability to grasp that such grave a phenomenon could be at hand. The root cause of the “stupidity” in question stems largely from their humanism, a way of life that focuses on the primacy of the individual and generally rejects religion and superstition. Humanism serves as one explanation for the local population’s disbelief in plagues.

“Judging by the rapidity with which the disease is spreading, it may well, unless we can stop it, kill off half the town before two months are out. That being so, it has small importance whether you call it plague or some rare kind of fever. The important thing is to prevent its killing off half the population of this town.” 

Rieux addresses a health team, convened at the local prefect’s office to deliberate on measures to be taken regarding the plague’s outbreak. Whereas medical colleagues and local authorities alike prefer a wait-and-see policy so as not to alarm the public, Rieux stresses the urgent stakes at hand: With the growing spread of a contagious and lethal disease, austere regulations must be enacted to avoid a high death toll. That Rieux emphasizes the priority of taking decisive, immediate action over quibbling about words reflects the novel’s heightened attention to language as well as elements of existentialist philosophy.

“Grand had personally witnessed an odd scene that took place at the tobacconist’s. An animated conversation was in progress and the woman behind the counter started airing her views about a murder case that had created some stir in Algiers. A young commercial employee had killed an Algerian on a beach. ‘I always say,’ the woman began, ‘if they clapped all that scum in jail, decent folks could breathe more freely.’ She was too much startled by Cottard’s reaction, he dashed out of the shop without a word of excuse, to continue.” 

An instance of intertextuality occurs in this shop worker’s brief evocation of a murder in Algiers, this fictional case having served as the centerpiece of Camus’s earlier work The Stranger (1942). Here, the woman’s opinion as to how the legal system would best punish the criminal stands in stark opposition to Tarrou’s remarks on justice, delivered prior to his death. The silent Cottard’s unexpected fleeing from the shop upon hearing the clerk’s comments recalls his criminal past and foreshadows his futile attempts to avoid apprehension by the police at the end of the novel.

“For weeks on end we were reduced to starting the same letter over and over again recopying the same scraps of news and the same personal appeals, with the result that after a certain time the living words, into which we had as it were transfused our hearts’ blood, were drained of any meaning. Thereafter we went on copying them mechanically, trying, through dead phrases, to convey some notion of our ordeal. And in the long run, to these sterile, reiterated monologues, these futile colloquies with a blank wall, even the banal formulas of a telegram came to seem preferable.” 

With quarantine measures now in full effect, mail service is halted to stifle the spread of germs. Creatures of their ingrained habits, residents inscribe their inner thoughts onto sheets of paper that won’t ever leave their domiciles. Each passing day only brings monotony, such that over time rewritten messages become devoid of meaning as language can no longer capture the general distress in Oran. With this inability to express themselves, residents find a certain relief in the basic formulaic messages comprising telegrams, their only recourse for communicating outside the city.

“Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.”

The narrator describes the collective angst during Oran’s quarantine, commenting specifically on residents’ reaction to time, which becomes a primary subject of reflection in the novel. With their mechanized routines on hold, and with no end to restrictions in sight, Oranians’ experience of time parallels that of the incarcerated, which is essentially their status during lockdown.

“You can’t understand. You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.”

Rambert, disappointed at Rieux’s refusal to provide him a certificate that could allow him to leave Oran and join his wife in Paris, reproaches the doctor for his strict adherence to his humanist philosophy, which gives primacy to the individual’s capacity to solve all problems with reason. In Rambert’s view, Rieux’s humanism leaves no room for matters of the heart.

“Yes, plague, like abstraction, was monotonous; perhaps only one factor changed, and that was Rieux himself. Standing at the foot of the statue of the Republic that evening, he felt it; all he was conscious of was a bleak indifference steadily gaining on him […].”

Exhausted by the overwhelming monotony and futility of treating plague patients day in and day out, a homeward-bound Rieux stands before Oran’s Statue of the Republic which, like the sky above him, is indifferent to the tragedy that has hit Oran. Here Rieux is hit by the realization that this apathy—like the plague—carries an element of contagion, as he too feels indifference creeping into him.

“Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it.”

During his first of two sermons, an impassioned Paneloux addresses a plague-weary, terrified congregation. The priest qualifies the ongoing pestilence in Oran as a devastating punishment sent down from God to jostle presumptuous residents of lax religious practice into awareness and to renew their vows with God.

“Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn’t come in contact with death; that’s why he can speak with such assurance of the truth, with a capital T.”

Humanists Rieux and Tarrou discuss Paneloux’s fiery speech warning his congregation to renounce their religious laxity and renew their vows with God. Rieux explains that while Paneloux is extremely well educated, his faith is largely abstract in that the priest has never stared death in the face. For Paneloux, since faith in God is the ultimate, undeniable, unwavering truth, the ongoing plague must exist as a product of God’s will.

“For though some prisoners are kept solitary, a prison forms a sort of community, as is proved by the fact that in our town jail the guards died of plague in the same proportion as the prisoners. The plague was no respecter of persons and under its despotic rule everyone, from the warden down to the humblest delinquent, was under sentence and, perhaps for the first time, impartial justice reigned in the prison.”

The narrator notes that the plague wreaks its havoc with no regard to its victims’ roles in society or hierarchical standing. In an odd twist, plague’s “despotic rule” instills a sense of justice in Oran’s prison, where those overseeing prisoners and determining their fates often commit gross acts of injustice against the jailed. These remarks presage and lead up to Tarrou’s discussion of the nonsensical and immoral nature of the justice system.

“From now on, poverty showed itself a stronger stimulus than fear, especially as, owing to its risks, such work was highly paid.”

The narrator addresses the irony in the fact that certain elements of life have been facilitated by the plague, as in the case of businessowners whose livelihoods are put to a halt during quarantine. During this stiflingly hot summer period, the death toll rises so high that city officials move from traditional funerals to rapid mass burials in pits; idle and impoverished, the unemployed willingly take on the task of digging the common graves. This horrific activity quenches their thirst for money, and it spares city officials from resorting to prison labor, an ethically questionable practice.

“Our fellow citizens had fallen into line, adapted themselves, as people say, to the situation, because there was no way of doing otherwise. Naturally they retained the attitudes of sadness and suffering, but they had ceased to feel their sting. Indeed, to some, Dr. Rieux among them, this precisely was the most disheartening thing: the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.” 

Referring to Oranians’ eventual acceptance of plague as the status quo, the narrator goes on to qualify the sense of fatality that has overtaken their emotions, to the point where residents barely feel the severity of their grief. Given Oranians’ habit-driven nature, they have now adopted the “habit of despair,” a defense mechanism that pales in comparison to experiencing the rawness of true despair.

“[L]ike all of us who have not yet died of plague he fully realizes that his freedom and his life may be snatched from him at any moment. But since he, personally, has learned what it is to live in a state of constant fear, he finds it normal that others should come to know this state.”

This section of Tarrou’s notebook contains comments about Cottard’s stance toward the plague and its effects on Oran’s people. In that Cottard spends his life hiding from the police, he perpetually feels the precarity of freedom; because of this, he finds it just that all Oranians now live with that same nagging fear of having their liberties usurped.

“But now that I’ve seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.” 

Since the beginning of quarantine, Rambert has devised strategies for leaving Oran to join his wife in Paris. Having stressed to Rieux that he bears no connection to Oran other than his work as a journalist sent to report in the city, Rambert begs the doctor to provide him medical documents to facilitate his departure. Upon Rieux’s refusal, Rambert engages the assistance of a group of Spaniards poised to smuggle him out of Oran, and he decides to help the sanitary squad combat the pestilence while awaiting his departure. However, just as his escape is about to transpire, Rambert is seized by a sense of solidarity that prompts him to remain in Oran.

“No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”

In his second sermon Paneloux justifies the brutal death of Othon’s son as an act of God’s will and urges his congregants to do the same as evidence of their unwavering faith. Here Rieux voices his full-on dissent with Paneloux’s line of thinking, explaining to the priest that his humanist notion of love doesn’t include blind faith in a belief system that would allow for—let alone cause—such evil as the suffering of children.

“[T]he balefires of the pestilence were blazing ever more merrily in the crematorium. It is true that the actual number of deaths showed no increase. But it seemed that plague had settled in for good at its most virulent, and it took its daily toll of deaths with the punctual zeal of a good civil servant.”

Camus uses irony and sarcasm to communicate that the plague’s force has hit a plateau. Oxymoronically describing flames in the crematorium as “merrily” burning, the author likens the vicious scourge’s efficient activity to that of a time-conscious, well-performing civil servant—typically an ordinary person performing dull, routine tasks of questionable significance.

“What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.”

Over the course of a lengthy intimate conversation with Rieux that establishes their friendship, Tarrou reveals details about his past that have brought him to lead a life opposed to murder and killing. Here Tarrou explains his view that all humans carry an element of plague within them, such that a “good man” remains ever aware of the capacity for infecting others and consciously acts in society as an agent of non-contamination.

“[A] loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”

At the sight of a crying Grand reminiscing about tender moments with his long-deceased wife, Rieux’s inner thoughts digress from their typically duty-driven, rational, humanist stance, taking on a more emotional tone. Unbeknownst to Rieux, Grand is in early stages of plague infection, which he will fight off and overcome, making him Oran’s first plague survivor. Ultimately, Grand’s display of emotion foreshadows the power of love fueling his “resurrection” as well as the imminent decline of plague in Oran.

“Tarrou had ‘lost the match,’ as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.” 

With Tarrou having just succumbed to the plague, Rieux reflects on their recent conversation during a brief interlude from fighting the disease. During this conversation, Tarrou, having shed his mask and revealed details of his past, established a genuine friendship with Rieux. Here a wistful and bitter Rieux considers Tarrou’s words, wondering if his own survival constitutes a true victory given that Tarrou has died. Ultimately, he realizes that Tarrou, in his scheme of what matters in life, would have considered even a memory of friendship shared—a trace of life—a triumph.

“Gradually he found himself drawn into the seething, clamorous mass and understanding more and more the cry that went up from it, a cry that, for some part at least, was his. Yes, they had suffered together, in body no less than in soul, from a cruel leisure, exile without redress, thirst that was never slaked. Among the heaps of corpses, the clanging bells of ambulances, the warnings of what goes by the name of fate, among unremitting waves of fear and agonized revolt, the horror that such things could be, always a great voice had been ringing in the ears of these forlorn, panicked people, a voice calling them back to the land of their desire, a homeland.”

As Rieux walks amid rejoicing Oranians, he feels himself in solidarity with them as their cries, so recently and for so long expressions of pain, metamorphose into expressions of joy. If the plague’s “reign of terror” has finally come to a close, the horrors it has brought to the city have accumulated over time; Camus performs this effect by creating a “piling up” of negative images, sounds, and feelings. Here the voice that has sustained residents through the crisis erupts as the crowd’s din grows increasingly loud. The use of the term “homeland” here is both literal and figurative; while Oranians have not left their city for nearly a year, they have nevertheless felt themselves in exile, as their community was decimated by the plague.

“‘All those folks are saying: It was plague. We’ve had the plague here.’ You’d almost think they expected to be given medals for it. But what does that mean, ‘plague’? Just life, no more than that.” 

Addressing Rieux, the elderly asthmatic patient refers to Oran’s residents celebrating in the streets as the city reopens. Despite the absurdity of his sole quotidian activity, the old man possesses cutting insight on the deeper significance of the recent calamity, noting that plague doesn’t constitute a spectacular occurrence; rather, it exists as an integral part of life.