The Plague Part I

Albert Camus' The Plague, published in 1947, tells the fictional story of a bubonic plague outbreak in the French colonized Algerian port city Oran. Camus uses the terror and misery caused by the outbreak to ask basic questions about the possibility for meaning in life.

I got my copy from Amazon for just $.99 in the kindle edition, see the link at the bottom of the post. The edition is published by ebookeden.com, but unfortunately it does not anywhere list the translator. Since it's just from French to English, hopefully translation isn't such a big issue and we can discuss the text on a more thematic level.

One of Camus' most important philosophical ideas is the paradox of the absurd. Human beings need life to have meaning. We want our lives to have importance, but upon reflection, we know that we will die sooner or later and that anything we accomplish will eventually vanish. For Camus this meant that the universe is indifferent to human suffering and absurd, without inherent meaning.

To create the setting for The Plague, Camus depicts the Algerian town Oran, not in elaborate orientalist splendor as you might find in a lot of other European texts dealing with Middle Eastern or North African cities. On the contrary, Camus tries to depict a city that is indistinguishable from any other, proclaiming "for its ordinariness is what strikes one first about the town of Oran, which is merely a large French port on the Algerian coast..." (location 549). The time-frame, too, is intended to be non-specific, the events of the novel taking place in the non-specific year 194-.

On the other hand, Camus relies on the harshness of the North African summer to create an atmosphere of oppressive heat, as "during the summer the sun bakes the houses bone-dry, sprinkles our walls with grayish dust, and you have no option but to survive those days of fire indoors" (location 557).

The people of Oran are bored and fill their time "cultivating habits" and in commerce, pursuing material wealth. When the people are not doing business, they are frittering away their lives doing nothing meaningful. For Camus, this is explicitly the meaning of modernity, and not something unique to Oran, as he says, "Oran, however, seems to be a town without intimations (that their might be something different than this situation); in other words, completely modern" (location 571).

Once the setting is established, The Plague introduces us to its central character, Dr. Rieux, as he steps on the corpse of a dead rat outside his apartment. The rats soon begin dieing by the thousands. The rats "were found lining the gutters, each with a gout of blood, like a red flower, on its tapering muzzle; some were bloated and already beginning to rot, others rigid, with their whisker still erect" (location 800).

The dead rats are an omen that largely goes unheeded by the populace. They are also a metaphor for the condition of humanity. The rats suffer and die, are thrown away and burned by the uncaring townsfolk in much the same way that people suffer in an uncaring universe. The rats both foreshadow and represent the suffering of the population of Oran.

Camus connects the suffering of the rats with human suffering not much later on. Dr. Rieux is called to an apartment where a man has tried to hang himself. As Rieux examines the man, he notes, "in the intervals of the man's breathing he seemed to hear the little squeals of rats" (location 861).

The catastrophe that Oran is about to suffer is not unique either. Rieux ruminate about historical plagues,

"Athens, a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns with the victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseilles piling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague-wind; the damp purifying pallets stuck to the mud floor at the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling through London's ghoul-haunted darkness, nights and days filled always, everywhere, with the eternal cry of human pain" (location 1262).

The plague is not just a plague; it is human suffering in general. The first to fall ill is Dr. Rieux's concierge, M. Michel, succumbing to an agonizing fever. While the number of cases grows, the town authorities try to remain optimistic; they do not want to cause alarm. As the death toll rises even higher, the town is put under quarantine and the plague officially declared.

Camus, Albert. The Plague. Unknown translator. eBookEden.com. eBook.