The Plague

by Albert Camus

What still had meaning for Camus is that despite humans being subjects in

an indifferent and “absurd” universe, in which meaning is challenged by the fact that we all die, meaning can be created, however provisionally and unstably, by our own decisions and interpretations.

Ultimately, the plague enables people to understand that their individual suffering is meaningless. As the epidemic “evolves” within the seasons, so do the citizens of Oran, who instead of willfully giving up to a disease they have no control over, decide to fight against their impending death, thus unwillingly creating optimism in the midst of hopelessness. This is where Camus channels his thoughts behind the importance of solidarity: although the plague

is still primarily an agent of death, it provides the uncanny opportunity for people to realize that individual suffering is absurd.

The only impression of that moment which, afterwards, he could recall was the passing of a railroadman with a box full of dead rats under his arm.

On the top floor, the third, Rieux noticed something scrawled in red chalk on a door on the left: Come in, I’ve hanged myself.

They entered the room. A rope dangled from a hanging lamp above a chair lying on its side. The dining-room table had been pushed into a corner. But the rope hung empty.

“I was going out and I heard a noise. When I saw that writing on the door, I thought it was a prank.

News-venders were shouting the latest news that the rats had disappeared. But Rieux found his patient leaning over the edge of the bed, one hand pressed to his belly and the other to his neck, vomiting pinkish bile into a slop-pail.

Michel’s death marked, one might say, the end of the first period, that of bewildering portents, and the beginning of another, relatively more trying, in which the perplexity of the early days gradually gave place to panic.

It’s hard on the lungs, blowing a trombone.” “Ah, if you’ve got weak lungs, it don’t do you any good, blowing down a big instrument like that.”

“In town today a streetcar was stopped because a dead rat had been found in it. (Query: How did it get there?) Two or three women promptly alighted. The rat was thrown out. The car went on.

‘Philippe, one doesn’t talk of rats at table. For the future I forbid you to use the word.’

‘Your father’s right,’ approved the mouse. “The two poodles buried their noses in their plates, and the owl acknowledged

thanks by a curt, perfunctory nod.

Usually the sick man died, in a stench of corruption.

in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.

A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all,

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible.

They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.

Ambition, certainly, was not the spur that activated Joseph Grand; that he would swear to, wryly smiling. All he desired was the prospect of a life suitably insured on the material side by honest work, enabling him to devote his leisure to his hobbies.

confabulated.

An animated conversation was in progress and the woman behind the counter started airing her views about a murder case that had created some stir in Algiers. A young commercial employee had killed an Algerian on a

beach.

“I always say,” the woman began, “if they clapped all that scum in jail, decent folks could breathe more freely.”

connoted.

They were worried and irritated, but these are not feelings with which to confront plague. Their first reaction, for instance, was to abuse the authorities. The Prefect’s riposte to criticisms echoed by the press. Could not the regulations be modified and made less stringent? was somewhat unexpected. Hitherto neither the newspapers nor the Ransdoc Information Bureau had been given any official statistics relating to the epidemic. Now the Prefect supplied them daily to the bureau, with the request that they should be broadcast once a week.

voluble.

The rest of the story, to Grand’s thinking, was very simple. The common lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love.

At this point a little imagination was needed to grasp what Grand was trying to convey. Owing largely to fatigue, he gradually lost grip of himself, had less and less to say, and failed to keep alive the feeling in his wife that she

was loved. An overworked husband, poverty, the gradual loss of hope in a better future, silent evenings at home, what chance had any passion of surviving such conditions? Probably Jeanne had suffered. And yet she’d stayed; of course one may often suffer a long time without knowing it. Thus years went by. Then, one day, she left him. Naturally she hadn’t gone alone. “I was very fond of you, but now I’m so tired. I’m not happy to go, but one needn’t be happy to make another start.” That, more or less, was what she’d said in her letter.

“No,” Rambert said bitterly, “you can’t understand. You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.”

But he knew, too, that abstraction sometimes proves itself stronger than happiness; and then, if only then, it has to be taken into account. And this was what was going to happen to Rambert, as the doctor was to learn when, much later,

Nevertheless, many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits as yet. Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come. Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn’t yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead. In short, they were waiting for the turn of events.

“If today the plague is in your midst, that is because the hour has struck for taking thought. The just man need have no fear, but the evildoer has good cause to tremble. For plague is the flail of God and

And while a good many people adapted themselves to confinement and carried on their humdrum lives as before, there were others who rebelled and whose one idea now was to break loose from the prison-house.

Grand stopped abruptly and seized the doctor by a button of his coat. The words came stumbling out of his almost toothless mouth. “I’d like you to understand, doctor. I grant you it’s easy enough to choose between a ‘but’ and an ‘and.’ It’s a bit more difficult to decide between ‘and’ and ‘then.’ But definitely the hardest thing may be to know whether one should put an ‘and’ or leave it out.” “Yes,” Rieux said, “I see your point.”

the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one, or, failing that, to be able to plunge the loved one, when a time of absence intervenes, into a dreamless sleep timed to last unbroken until the day they meet again.

The newspapers published new regulations reiterating the orders against attempting to leave the town and warning those who infringed them that they were liable to long terms of imprisonment.

since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence.”

Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.” “Yes. A never ending defeat.”

The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

The plague victim died away from his family and the customary vigil beside the dead body was forbidden, with the result that a person dying in the evening spent the night alone,

The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.

the most disheartening thing: that the habit of despair

is worse than despair itself.

love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.

he had few illusions left, and fatigue was robbing him of even these remaining few. He knew that, over a period whose end he could not glimpse, his task was no longer to cure but to diagnose. To detect, to see, to describe, to register, and then condemn, that was his present function. Sometimes a woman would clutch his sleeve, crying shrilly: “Doctor, you’ll save him, won’t you?”

But he wasn’t there for saving life; he was there to order a sick man’s evacuation. How futile was the hatred he saw on faces then! “You haven’t a heart!” a woman told him on one occasion. She was wrong; he had one. It saw him through his twenty-hour day, when he hourly watched men dying who were meant to live. It enabled him to start anew each morning. He had just enough heart for that, as things were now. How could that heart have sufficed for saving life?