Understanding Albert Camus The Plague :: Albert Camus Plague Essays

Understanding The Plague The Plague, written by Albert Camus, is a triumph of literary craft. Camus created a commentary on the way humans react to nerve-racking situations and circumstances in his fictional city of Oran in North Africa. The reader is presented with Oran as a city of several hundred thousand masses. All of whom search to take life for granted. The people of Oran ar constantly driven by business or money and only stop for lifes finer pleasures on the weekends. A fairly accurate parallel to todays world. When an outbreak of plague begins in Oran, nobody pays attention at first. When the problem becomes too big to be ignored, the city is taken somewhat by surprise and placed under quarantine. The city remains isolated from the outside world for over a year, and when the outbreak reaches its peak, hundreds are dying every day. The main characters in the story are Dr. Rieux, Cottard, Tarrou, Grand, and Rambert. Rieux is the narrator (although he does not reveal him self as the narrator until the end of the story). Through Rieuxs eyes and Tarrous diary entries , Camus depicts a personal and completely lifelike view of a major catastrophe. The was Camus creates such a quiet masterpiece of literature is not by reading material death statistics and important events it is by his focus on the individuals involved in the crisis. The most striking feature of the novel is actually very sublime. The way Camus approaches the inconceivable catastrophe of the plague is actually the opposite of the way the media in society today reports and enjoys to hear about such catastrophes. It is much easier to deal with disasters in numbers. Todays reality wants to hear a comforting 250 dead today instead of hearing about the people who died agonizing deaths and the people who love them, being forced into quarantine forward the bodies are cold. Camus forces the reader to see the brutal realities of the plague, not merely in blood and gore, but also in the subtle and profound changes that occur in the people of Oran. The way Camus does this is by his never-ceasing emphasis on individual people and not the masses of the town as a whole. At the beginning of the novel, people were reluctant to recognize the plague as something that would change their lives. They thought it was simply a passing inconvenience.