The Plague (French: La Peste) is a 1947 absurdist novel by Albert Camus. The plot centers around the French Algerian city of Oran as it combats a plague outbreak and is put under a city-wide quarantine. The novel presents a snapshot into life in Oran as seen through Camus’s absurdist lens.
Camus used as source material the cholera epidemic that killed a large proportion of Oran’s population in 1849, but set the novel in the 1940s. Oran and its surroundings were struck by disease several times before Camus published his novel. According to an academic study, Oran was decimated by the bubonic plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks (in 1921: 185 cases; 1931: 76 cases; and 1944: 95 cases) were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.
The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus’s objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their own destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka’s, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.
Major characters
Dr. Bernard Rieux: Dr. Bernard Rieux is described as a man about age 35, of moderate height, dark-skinned, with close-cropped black hair. At the beginning of the novel, Rieux’s wife, who has been ill for a year, leaves for a sanatorium. It is Rieux who treats the first victim of plague and first uses the word plague to describe the disease.
He urges the authorities to take action to stop the spread of the epidemic. However, at first, along with everyone else, the danger the town faces seems unreal to him. He feels uneasy but does not realise the gravity of the situation. Within a short while, he grasps what is at stake and warns the authorities that unless steps are taken immediately, the epidemic could kill off half the town’s population of two hundred thousand within a couple of months.
During the epidemic, Rieux heads an auxiliary hospital and works long hours treating the victims. He injects serum and lances the abscesses, but there is little more that he can do, and his duties weigh heavily upon him. He never gets home until late, and he must distance himself from the natural pity that he feels for the victims; otherwise, he would not be able to go on. It is especially hard for him when he visits a victim in their own home because he knows that he must immediately call for an ambulance and have the person removed from the house. Often, the relatives plead with him not to do so as they know they may never see the person again.
Rieux works to combat the plague simply because he is a doctor and his job is to relieve human suffering. He does not do it for any grand, religious purpose, like Paneloux (Rieux does not believe in God), or as part of a high-minded moral code, like Tarrou. He is a practical man, doing what needs to be done without any fuss, but he knows that the struggle against death is something that he can never win.
Jean Tarrou: Jean Tarrou arrived in Oran some weeks before the plague broke out for unknown reasons. He is not there on business since he appears to have private means. Tarrou is a good-natured man who smiles a lot. Before the plague came, he liked to associate with the Spanish dancers and musicians in the city. He also keeps a diary full of his observations of life in Oran, which the Narrator incorporates into the narrative.
It is Tarrou who first comes up with the idea of organising teams of volunteers to fight the plague. He wants to do so before the authorities begin to conscript people, and he does not like the official plan to get prisoners to do the work. He takes action, prompted by his own code of morals; he feels that the plague is everybody’s responsibility and that everyone should do their duty. What interests him, he tells Rieux, is how to become a saint even though he does not believe in God.
Later in the novel, Tarrou tells Rieux, with whom he has become friends, the story of his life. His father, although a kind man in private, was also an aggressive prosecuting attorney who tried death penalty cases, arguing strongly for the death penalty to be imposed. As a young boy, Tarrou attended one day of a criminal proceeding in which a man was on trial for his life. The idea of capital punishment disgusted him. After he left home before 18, his main interest in life was his opposition to the death penalty, which he regarded as state-sponsored murder. However, years of activism have left him disillusioned.
When the plague epidemic is virtually over, Tarrou becomes one of its last victims but puts up a heroic struggle before dying.
Raymond Rambert: Raymond Rambert is a journalist who is visiting Oran to research a story on the standards of living in the Arab colony of Oran. When the plague strikes, he finds himself trapped in a city with which he feels he has no connection. He misses his girlfriend who is in Paris and uses all his ingenuity and resourcefulness to persuade the city bureaucracy to allow him to leave.
When that fails, he contacts smugglers, who agree to help him escape for a fee of ten thousand francs. However, there is a hitch in the arrangements, and by the time another escape plan is arranged, Rambert has changed his mind. He decides to stay in the city and continue to help fight the plague, saying that he would feel ashamed of himself if he pursued a merely personal happiness. He now feels that he belongs in Oran, and that the plague is everyone’s business, including his.
Joseph Grand: Joseph Grand is a fifty-year-old clerk for the city government. He is tall and thin. Poorly paid, he lives an austere life, but is capable of deep affection. In his spare time, Grand polishes up his Latin, and is also writing a novel. However, he is such a perfectionist that he continually rewrites the first sentence and can progress no further. One of his problems in life is that he can rarely find the correct words to express what he means. Grand tells Rieux that he married while still in his teens, but overwork and poverty took their toll (Grand did not receive the career advancement that he had been promised), and his wife Jeanne left him. He tried but failed to write a letter to her, and he still grieves for his loss.
Grand is a neighbor of Cottard, and it is he who calls Rieux for help when Cottard tries to commit suicide. When the plague takes a grip on the town, Grand joins the team of volunteers, acting as general secretary and recording the statistics. Rieux regards him as “the real example of the calm virtue that animated the public health squads”. Grand contracts the plague and asks Rieux to burn his manuscript, but then makes an unexpected recovery. At the end of the novel, Grand says he is much happier, as he has written to Jeanne and made a fresh start on his novel.
Cottard: Cottard lives in the same building as Grand. He does not appear to have a job and is described as having private means although he describes himself as “a sales representative for wines and liqueurs”. Cottard is an eccentric figure, silent and secretive, who tries to hang himself in his room. He is anxious for Rieux not to report the incident, as he is under investigation by the authorities for an unstated crime. In an offhand reference to the plot of The Stranger, Cottard reacts by a sudden exit from the tobacconist shop when she mentions an arrest in Algiers of a man for killing an Arab on a beach.
Cottard’s personality changes after the outbreak of plague. Whereas he was aloof and mistrustful before, he now becomes agreeable and tries hard to make friends. He appears to relish the coming of the plague, and Tarrou thinks it is because he finds it easier to live with his own fears now that everyone else is in a state of fear, too. Cottard also avoids arrest by the police during the chaos caused by the plague. Cottard takes advantage of the crisis to make money by selling contraband cigarettes and inferior liquor.
As the quarantine of the city comes to an end, Cottard anticipates being arrested after life returns to normal. He experiences severe mood swings; sometimes he is sociable, but at other times, he shuts himself up in his room. On the day the city gates are reopened, he shoots at random at people on the street, wounding some and killing a dog. The police arrest him.
Father Paneloux: Father Paneloux is a learned, well-respected Jesuit priest. He is well known for having given a series of lectures in which he championed a pure form of Christian doctrine and chastised his audience about their laxity. During the first stage of the plague outbreak, Paneloux preaches a sermon at the cathedral. He has a powerful way of speaking, and he insists to the congregation that the plague is a scourge sent by God to those who have hardened their hearts against Him.
However, Paneloux also claims that God is present to offer succour and hope. Later, Paneloux attends at the bedside of Othon’s stricken son and prays that the boy may be spared. After the boy’s death, Paneloux tells
