Albert Camus' 'The Plague,' read in quarantine for the first time, warns us to reset our own priorities
lashes you across the face. In a commercial port in Algiers, a disease appears, as if from nowhere. It begins inconspicuously, with the appearance of a few disordered rats, then works its way virulently through the human population, as aided by indifference, hypocrisy, laziness. Shops close, streets empty. But the infection picks up steam, spreading according to a geometric progression, producing a steeply rising “death graph.
“The Plague” takes place in Oran, a city that Camus, as a son and partisan of its rival, Algiers, found tacky, shallow, commercial; treeless and soulless. As a younger man, he’d called it a city without “reprieve.” The citizens of Oran may not be especially sinful, but they subordinate every aspect of life to business , and this has left them unprepared for something as indifferent to human needs and desires as a pestilence.
Everyone else is merely reactive — but each is reactive in his own way. Rieux refuses to philosophize, to abstract away even for a minute from his duty — but merely to do it. Then there is Tarrou, an observer and incorrigible overthinker, the one who must seek out why. There is Rambert, the journalist who longs to escape the city and reunite with his lover.
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