The Plague by Albert Camus

Extract

[...] The plot is set in Oran, during the period of colonial Algeria - Algeria being Camus' country of origin: the city becomes the setting for a plague epidemic, spread by rats, and gradually turns into a closed environment. The novel is composed of five parts, which follow the narrative progression of the text; but which also correspond to philosophical stages. The first part opens with an introductory description of the city of Oran, pronounced by an unknown but internal narrator: « What is more original in our town is the difficulty one may have in dying there.5 ». The narration then focuses on the character of Dr. [...]

[...] New edition [online]. Arras: Artois Presses Université Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, 'The dialogue Benjamin Fondane and Albert Camus in The Rebel». p.173-185. [...]

[...] Finally, Tarrou, a stranger to the city, records in his notebooks his experience of the absurd, but, guided by his morality and his quest for understanding, offers his help to Rieux and supports him in setting up a sanitary service. For Benkhoja Ammar, Tarrou corresponds, like Rieux, to a '« regime of positive credence11. The third part, shorter than the others, is composed almost entirely of narrative, in order to deploy its theme: the wait in the confinement that the 'prisoners of the plague12. This chapter takes place in the summer, a dry and heavy summer, punctuated by violent winds and fires. [...]

[...] Rieux is indeed called by Grand, a municipal employee, who has just prevented Cottard, a character who will embody vice in a situation of catastrophe - notably because he initiates a black market during the quarantine - from committing suicide. Rieux seeks advice from his colleague the old Castel; it is indeed the plague. Rieux asks to close the city. The second part, which corresponds to spring, begins with the consequences of isolation for the inhabitants: communication with the outside is made impossible and contributes to the anxious climate that reigns in Oran7. [...]

[...] As a new serum is proposed, the main characters witness the slow agony of a child, the son of Judge Othon - a character marked at the beginning of the story as indifferent. The boy's youth makes this agony a climax in the epidemic and represents the horror of the disease:But at least until then, they were scandalized abstractly, as it were, because they had never looked at, for so long, the agony of an innocent.14. Later, one witnesses a long tirade by Tarrou on pacifist resistance to evil, on the 'plague". [...]