The Plague

Few writers have delved as deeply into the subject of death as Albert Camus. It comes as no surprise, then, that "The Plague" focuses precisely on this. Camus' story revolves around a group of men who are defined by their gathering in the face of and against the plague. In it, we witness the courage, fear, and calculation that we have read or heard about in other places, such as the battle against Ebola in Africa.

Through the narrator, Dr. Rieux, we can understand why many other doctors rushed to the epicenter of the plague. I believe Camus intended this novel to be both literal and allegorical. He was well aware of the great cholera epidemic of 1849 in Oran, Algeria (where the novel is set), as well as other outbreaks in his native district of Mondovi in the Algerian interior. Like every great metaphorical or allegorical work, "The Plague" can represent more than its original intentions, including moral and metaphorical pestilences that have occurred after Camus' lifetime.

As time passes, "The Plague" can also tell of a different type of plague: that of a destructive, hyper-materialist, turbo-capitalism. It can do so just as effectively as any contemporary commentary. In fact, it does so especially well because of the concept of the Absurd. Our society is absurd, and Camus' novel examines, among many other things, our relationship to the absurdity of modern existence. Central to Camus' existential isolation was the discrepancy between the power and beauty of nature and the desolation of the human condition. From his earliest days, he loved the sea and deserts and saw man's mortality in the light of their indifferent vastness.

What I love most about this novel is its depth. It can be read as a thrilling page-turner, an exposition of Existentialism, and even a metaphorical comment on the German occupation of France. For anyone unfamiliar with the work of Camus, this is a great place to start. In my opinion, it is an even better novel than "The Stranger".

Albert Camus’ The Plague is not a laugh RIOT as one might initially think.

Just kidding, of course. In fact, it is about the bubonic plague, a topic that is really not very funny at all.

However, it is a modern masterpiece that is rich in allegory, symbolism, and imagery. The surface story is set in the early 1940s and tells of the plague that visited the Algerian coastal city of Oran. While Camus presents a complete account of the disease, with all its associated fear, despair, compassion, and selfless heroism, the true story of lasting significance lies between the lines. Here, he offers insightful observations and thought-provoking dissertations on philosophy and theology.

Camus uses the epidemic as a means to explore relationships, community, and existence. Some critics have seen The Plague as an allegory of Germany’s occupation of France, but I believe it can also be read as representing man’s propensity towards chaos and evil, while ultimately remaining good. Scholars will note that Camus is primarily identified as an atheist, yet his later writings suggest at least a sympathetic stance towards religion.

Although some of the poetry of his French is inevitably lost in translation, his writing technique comes across as sparse yet eclectic. His characterization and imagery invite comparisons with such diverse stylists as Hemingway and DH Lawrence. And Camus’ individuality shines through his excellent prose. He is not an anodyne essayist but rather a vibrant athlete and a vocal member of the French resistance. Camus is a masterful yet reluctant artist. The fighter in him is revealed page after page. Perhaps the central message is that life is worth living and worth fighting for, regardless of the odds of victory, the seemingly overwhelming natural forces arrayed against us, or even the outcome of the fight.

The enduring residents of Oran do not so much fight and prevail as they simply survive. But Camus emphasizes that the very act of fighting, of resisting the devastating force of nature, makes them stronger and worthy of survival, regardless of whether or not they actually do survive.

For some reason, I didn't like La Peste nearly as much as I had expected.

In fact, I found it pretentious and annoying. Maybe I should re-read it. I have a feeling I missed something. My thoughts during the first reading were that the author seemed way too pleased with himself for having been a hero of the Resistance. And it no longer seemed very odd to me that Sartre had had a major falling out with him, which ended with them no longer speaking to each other.

After some recent discussions with a few of the many people who worship this book, I have been racking my brains to try and figure out what I have against it. The most convincing theory I can come up with is that I read it shortly after Winston Churchill's History of the Second World War. Given Camus's life story, it seemed to me that La Peste was intended as an allegory of what the French Resistance did in WW II. Churchill is rather dismissive of the Resistance and the Free French. He never quite says so outright, but it's clear he thought de Gaulle was a major pain in the ass, and that this was more of a political side-show than any real contribution towards winning the war.

So I think Camus got side-swiped here. I just kept thinking, roughly, OK, but these doctors are irrelevant, the real action is taking place in Stalingrad, Midway and el Alamein. Now that I write it down, I see that I am being very unfair to him. The story is in fact quite timeless. But I couldn't shake off the associations.

Since it's clear that no one in the world agrees with me on this, I made up a couple of fictional characters who do. You can meet them in my parody, A Tribute to Robin Baker's \"Sperm Wars\".

A loveless world is a dead world, and there can be no peace without hope. This profound truth is vividly illustrated in the French Algerian city of Oran. After thousands of rats perish in the streets, the bubonic plague unleashes its fury, spreading throughout the city like a wildfire. It sweeps through every corner, leaving a trail of devastation and despair in its wake.

The town's gates are firmly shut, and all travel to and from Oran is strictly prohibited. Even the simple act of sending and receiving mail becomes a distant luxury. As a result, the human struggle commences. People are faced with a difficult choice: should they find a way to flee the city and seek safety elsewhere, or should they stay and bravely fight the plague?

Will they rise above the chaos and become heroes, or will they succumb to fear and be labeled as cowards? The evil that exists in the world often stems from ignorance. Good intentions, if lacking in understanding, can cause just as much harm as malevolence. In the face of this crisis, the people of Oran must grapple with these profound questions and make decisions that will shape their fates and the future of their city.

  “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.”




A story about an epidemic wasn't unique when The Plague was written. Giovanni Boccaccio had written The Decameron more than 500 years earlier on the same subject. Camus's magnum opus isn't the most harrowing in epidemic literature. But there are many things that give it its place.



You may not have read the novel, but you've seen similar scenarios in movies. Often, there are logical loopholes or clichés. But The Plague has none of these. The writing is well thought-out and different from Camus's other works like The Stranger or The Fall. In those, the first person monologue creates a vivid character sketch while dealing with heavy philosophical concepts.



This novel is riskier as it lacks what Camus was comfortable with. It has Dr Rieux, but he's not the protagonist and you can't connect with the characters. Yet, their cumulative activities and emotions are real and relevant.



A chapter on religious dogmatism was a pleasant surprise. A conversation with a priest is important in The Stranger and here too. The character evolves with time and contact with the faithful who died of the plague.



The characters' emotions range from desolate depravity to reckless hope to psychological numbness. There's a Cronenbergian sense of humans as'meat' during the plague, which contrasts with Camus's humanitarian approach.




  “The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.”




The novel has a sense of unpredictability. Towards the end, you can't guess where the plot is going. The narrator wishes his chronicles were objective. The distant, cold storytelling enhances the experience but is a departure from the familiar Camus.



It's easy to see why the novel is popular during the recent pandemic. My first experience was a year before the pandemic. I was ignorant but struck by the novel's complete structuring.



The novel has all the elements of a masterpiece with one drawback. It can be too methodical for some readers. But this doesn't diminish its importance as a work of fiction.



Camus writes with style. Even during the epidemic, there's a character obsessed with the first sentence of his debut novel. There are also characters who use the pandemic for their selfish interests, but Camus writes it with humour, so you're entertained even when shocked.




   “However, there’s one thing I must tell you; there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make people smile, but the only means of fighting the plague is – common decency. … I don’t know what it means for other people, but in my case I know that it consists in doing my job.”

Some Notes on the First Reading of this New Translation

The story presents an odd form of partial omniscience despite being based on first-person narration. It is a psychohistory, delving into the psychology of a people. This passage refers to those quarantined in the city and separated from their loved ones.

There are moments of distraction when they make plans hinting at the end of the plague. They unexpectedly feel the sting of jealousy without an object. Others experience sudden rebirths, emerging from their torpor on certain days like Sundays and Saturday afternoons. Or a certain melancholy at the end of each day warns them, not always accurately, that their memory will return. That hour of the night, hard for the prisoner or exile with only emptiness to examine, suspends them for a moment before they return to apathy, confined with the plague.

I compared Marris's treatment with Stuart Gilbert's for readability. Until around page 140, Gilbert's English was more accessible. But then, as I read Marris, something wonderful happened. It was during the scene where Rieux and Tarrou in the car, and Rambert and Cottard on the street, encounter the city magistrate. Suddenly, the prose improved. I think it might be related to the long philosophical opening stopping around here (it continues later) and the story moving on to Rambert's plan to escape the quarantined city.

However, as soon as that action-based scene ends, we're back to the same halting diction. I haven't read the original, so I can't speak to the text's faithfulness. But I've read Gilbert's English translation twice, and he finds an English rhythm that Marris doesn't consistently achieve. Maybe it's due to a die-hard loyalty to the original. Someone fluent in both languages will have to determine that.

It's important to remember that The Plague is colonialist literature, like Rudyard Kipling's Kim. The books' idiosyncratic excellence doesn't relieve us of considering them in such terms. While reading, before remembering the book's colonialist taint, I thought Camus's choice not to write about race or class was admirable. I was wrong. Subsequently, I realized the choice was minimizing. The long, brutal Algerian War of Independence killed hundreds of thousands. When Camus writes of the opera house and its elegant attendees, he's likely not referring to non-whites. I don't mean to impute impure attitudes, but in 1947, it was still possible to view Algeria as French and the locals as peripheral. This ease with the repressive status quo is disappointing in an artist of Camus's stature. It's an ahistorical view, but there it is.

Word of advice: Don’t read a book about plague during a plague, like the one we're experiencing now--COVID 19.

While excellently written, you have to have the fortitude of a survivor of a plague to finish a full-fledged story about one. Like a wasp in treacle I trudged on to the end. It helped a little that I had lived in the very city that Camus’ plague took place.

I spent a year and a few months in the 1970s with my wife and little boy in Oran (WaHran), Algeria, the setting of Camus’ novel. A turbulent time in the region and in our own lives—more the latter than the former. I’ve often thought back and marveled at how irresponsible I was to traipse around strange and iffy countries with my tiny family; but in my rationalizing I know that I wanted then to provide for them, as well as myself I admit, an interesting, if not adventurous, life.

I also think of the very close calls with venomous snakes and spiders, wild animals, car accidents and serious outlaws. What was I thinking?

Disease, especially plague, was more of a possibility then than I realized. Especially in Oran, where we had to drink bottled water— Mouzaia and Saida only, and collected our water to wash dishes, make tea, wash up, etc., from a spigot of streaming water with no idea where it was coming from. Americans aren’t naturally endowed with entrails of copper tubing that the locals often seem to have in places like Africa, the Middle East or Mexico.

We Yanks are, and I was then, naive about such things due to a surfeit of trust— probably our most likable national quality in the eyes of other nations, the “dumb blonde” syndrome nastily applied to females, but I admit from my own experience that males have often been the real culprits as “heads of households”.

Plague as the main character in the novel sneaked up on the quasi-fictional town of Oran. Dr. Rieux and his friends did their best to treat the disease and handle the complications it caused to the people of Oran, one of whom even tried to come up with a local vaccine for it, but the disease was so stubborn that it took its time to ravage the population of Oran.

We today can easily learn from what Camus is teaching us in his novel. What can you do when facing impending disaster? Sometimes you have no choice but just to do what you can do with whatever comes, to do your best, and accept the fact that fate might not favor you as an individual. You have to live through it true to yourself, struggling to survive to the best of your innate ability while helping and serving others needing your help.

Cherish the belief that chance favors unorthodoxy. Good fortune falls to those who wade against the tide. Kismet welcomes the stranger. And, faced with the impossible, never yield. (Pronouncements from a person who has not always paid heed to these fine thoughts.)

When I lived outside Oran in that small seaside village of Port-aux-Poules (port for the chickens), alternatively Mers El Hajjaj (port for hajjis or pilgrims to a nearby marabout), I would occasionally open the gate to a cemetery latched with barbed wire and read the inscriptions on the headstones—mostly European, a smattering of Arab names, and perhaps a few Jews. It was a Christian cemetery though mainly. I often wondered if a plague had brought them down or perhaps a series of battles or pogroms. The beach we lived on just happened to be also a landing area for Darby’s Rangers in World War Two for Operation Torch. (Concertina wire from that era still lined some of the dunes just a few yards from our villa.)

Incidentally, for the diversity-sensitive, there is hardly any mention of the Arab-Berber population with only the French colonials involved. A puzzling omission given that the majority of the inhabitants of that city fictional or otherwise had to be Arab-Berber and most definitely Muslim—no mention of them either. Camus was born in Algeria, although not in Oran, and should have included them however peripherally. This can happen when a thinking writer, as Camus certainly was, is more focused on espousing his fixed idea—this one being existentialist absurdism, which might be a definition of the life we lead on this Earth.

“Plague” seemed to me really a handbook on what to expect from a plague, which it predicts will always be with us. It visits then hides among us for decades to return and wreak havoc again. The human condition.

Moreover, the descriptions in the book of the daily life during the plague were so vivid that it made me recall my own experiences in Oran. The fear and uncertainty that笼罩 the town, the desperate attempts of people to find a way out, and the selfless efforts of those like Dr. Rieux to combat the disease all came to life in my mind.

Camus’ portrayal of the characters’ psychological states was also remarkable. We could see how they were affected by the plague, how their relationships changed, and how they struggled to maintain their humanity in the face of such a crisis.

In conclusion, “Plague” is not just a novel about a historical event. It is a profound exploration of the human condition, a reminder of our vulnerability in the face of disasters, and a call to action for us to be prepared and to help each other when such situations arise.

[Edited, picture and shelves added 1/13/23]

Somehow, Camus manages to infuse humanism, optimism, and the power of love into what could otherwise be a deeply depressing narrative of the bubonic plague that struck Oran, Algeria, in the 1940s. It all begins with the mysterious death of the rats, and from there, the story unfolds. (Thankfully, with COVID, we don't have the added horror of rats.)

After a great deal of bureaucratic bungling and delays, the city is isolated from the outside world by quarantine. Much of the story centers on those who, by chance, are separated from their loved ones for several months. There is an element of intrigue as some plot to escape the town. However, for the most part, a dreary perseverance and indifference take hold of many in the city.

Camus uses the suffering and deaths of children to reflect on the role of God and religion. The barren, dry, windswept, and desolate town is so vividly portrayed that it becomes almost like a character in the story. It reminds me of the religious theme and the desolation of the Mexican town in Graham Green's novel The Power and the Glory.

If you're deterred by the thought that this is an incredibly depressing book, don't be. There is a tone of optimism that offsets the despair.

Photo of street scene in Oran by Ferhat Bouda on nytimes.com