The unknown narrator states that before Oran was struck by the plague, it was a city of monotonous routines: work, cafés, movies, and empty commercialism. He keeps notebooks containing detailed reports of his observations about daily life in Oran, including the mysterious illness that strikes the city. The narrator introduces the reader to Jean Tarrou, the author of a written eyewitness account of the events in question. Other victims succumb to the same illness in the days that follow. The concierge is the first victim of the plague.

At first, he doesn’t give a great deal of attention to this event, and the concierge for the building believes that someone is pulling a prank on them.Īs the appearance of dying rats continues to increase, the citizens of Oran start to feel uneasy and question the city government’s ability to address the problem. In the days that follow, an increasing number of rodents stagger out into the open and die. Rieux steps out of surgery and finds a dead rat lying on the floor. And despite his efforts in fighting the plague makes little or no difference, he continues to do so. He struggles with the authorities’ denial when he urges that stringent sanitation measures be taken to fight the rising epidemic. Rieux, is a committed humanist and atheist. The book begins with an unnamed narrator, who reveals his identity at the end of the novel, so as to make the chronicle that follows as objective as possible. This makes his description of the plague and the pain of loneliness exceptionally vivid and heartfelt. Illness, exile, and separation are themes that were present in Camus’ life and his reflections upon them form a vital counterpoint to the allegory. This, of course, is an allusion to Meursault’s murder in The Stranger and is connected with the ravages of the pestilence in The Plague.

In fact, in the novel he mentions “a young company employee who had killed an Arab on a beach”. He stresses the powerlessness of the individual to affect his destiny in an indifferent world. It tells the story of a plague epidemic in the Algerian coastal town of Oran, where thousands of rats are found dead all over the city.Ĭamus’ absurdist philosophy is at the background of the novel. The Plague was published in 1947 and is widely considered as Albert Camus’s most successful novel.

The plague book albert camus