In The Plague, Albert Camus tells the story of the Black Death reappearing in the French Colonial town of Oran on the coast of Algeria. This novel was written as a companion piece to his theoretical work The Rebel. The principles in that book are explained through the thoughts and actions of the main characters.
The idea of metaphysical rebellion is central to Camus’s thought; it is the belief that the world, as it exists, is meaningless and humans must rebel against such absurdity to make life meaningful and worth living. Oran itself can be seen as a microcosm of world society and the appearance of the plague can be interpreted as the absurdity that must be rebelled against and overcome. The plague serves no purpose and it has no meaning in and of itself. The citizens in this novel need to choose what it means so they can defeat it. Otherwise the plague is just a plague; it has no consciousness or volition, it is entirely neutral and can only do what it does because that is all it can do. The plague also corresponds with Camus’s concept of absolute nihilism which he defines in The Rebel as a negation of all existence. Absolute nihilism destroys without creating anything in its place.
As the town’s rats begin to die en masse, Dr. Rieux, the central character begins to take notice. He runs the town’s main hospital and manages the handling of the crisis. It is through his interactions with the other characters that his stoic point of view is expressed and it is through his relations with them that the ideas they represent also get revealed.
One important character is Paneloux, the Catholic priest who gives two sermons in the town’s cathedral to inspire the people of his flock. In one sermon he declares that the plague is meant to punish the town for turning away from God and only those who embrace God will live until it ends. Rieux and the others reject this notion but since Paneloux wants to serve humanity as well as God, they allow him to help in caring for victims of the disease. In another sermon he explains again that the Black Death is meant to inspire people’s love for God but by the end of the book it becomes obvious that his religious theories have no correspondence with reality. Camus uses Paneloux to show how religion is not a sufficient form of rebellion against absurdity since it signifies a submission and acceptance of the will of God and church, which he also believes to be a false belief. Paneloux made the wrong choice by embracing religious faith and his actions and beliefs ended up being of little consequence in Oran.
Another significant character is Tarrou. This heavyset man works closely with Rieux in the care and management of the patients. In one conversation he explains how he embraced communism when he was young. The pacifist Tarrou later rejected communism because he saw how it eventually curtailed people’s freedom and dignity, resulting in violence and mass murder for the sake of a ruling elite. He admits that he had little interest in the mechanics of Marxist economics or politics but the idea of serving humanity motivated him more than anything else. Tarrou represents Camus’s view that communism worked as a form of metaphysical rebellion but ultimately failed because it resulted in the enslavement of people rather than their liberation.
It is significant that both Tarrou and Paneloux die of the plague. Their deaths are emblematic of his rejection of religion and communism as forms of rebellion.
One character who does not die is the journalist Rambert. He is a young man who has recently fallen in love with a woman living in Paris. He can not get out of Oran to see her because the town is quarantined to prevent the plague from escaping to other places. He makes arrangement with some Spanish gangsters to be smuggled out. Rambert gets caught between his individual desire for love and happiness and his duty to help Rieux in treating the patients. He asks Rieux for advice on what to do but Rieux is indifferent; both choices are equally ethical from his point of view. It is the choices one makes that give life its meaning. Rambert symbolizes Camus’s concept of the ultimately moral form of rebellion so the author allows his character to live and get his due rewards at the end of the story.
Two lesser characters are the ironically named Grand and the gangster Cottard. Grand is an elderly man, possibly at the onset of senility, whose goal in life is to write a novel even though he has no talent and rewrites the first sentence over and over again as if he is suffering fron obsessive compulsive disorder. During the time of the plague, he sacrifices his writing to volunteer his time and effort to assisting Dr. Rieux at the hospital. Even though he plays a minor function, Rieux describes him as an ethically pure man. Cottard is the opposite. He is the happiest person in the book since the police were after him for a crime he committed long ago and then leave him alone while they work to maintain order in Oran. Meanwhile, Cottard, through his connections with the Spanish gangsters, finds ways to make money off smuggling operations since resources are scarce due to the town’s quarantine. His happiness is gained through bad faith and ignorance, the opposite of what Camus wishes to idealize in his study of metaphysical rebellion. Incidentally, Cottard is subtly linked with Meursault from The Stranger; in an early chapter he gets into an argument with some people in a grocery story who want to see Meursault get executed but Cottard wants the protagonist of that novel to be set free. Cottard does not die but you can tell what Camus thinks of him by what happens to him in the end.
The Plague is not without it problems. The narrator’s voice is too intrusive at times and there are long passages where he describes thoughts and situations in abstract language. Several sections read more like essays than fiction and the omniscient description can be overbearing. It could have been more like a story if Camus had allowed his ideas to be expressed through the actions and conversations of the people in the book. But then again, when he does allow that to happen the effect is not as strong as it could have been either; the characters all symbolize concepts that Camus explains in his philosophical writings but they do not act like natural people because of their all too obvious symbolical function. Since they are characters built up around ideas rather than being characters with ideas, they come off as flat and two-dimensional. When Rieux has discussions with them, it reads like Camus talking to himself rather than real people debating and analyzing issues.
The Plague is not one of Camus’s best books. The brevity of his other novels makes them stronger while the length and depth of his theoretical works also makes those books more complete. But familiarity with the latter makes it easy to see how The Plague continues on from The Stranger and functions as an auto-correction for those who misinterpret that first novel by thinking of Meursault as a hero.
Camus, Albert. The Plague. Vintage Books, New York: 1972.
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