Joseph Grand, a humble civil servant, endlessly reworks the first sentence of a novel he aspires to write. Raymond Rambert, a journalist from Paris, laments being stuck in Oran and separated from his wife.
Jean Tarrou, a mysterious visitor, records odd minutiae of the city’s goings-on in his notebooks, which serve as a primary source for Rieux’s chronicle. Rieux works around the clock tending to patients while members of his cohort experience varieties of quarantine-induced exile. Unable to linguistically qualify their despair, they grow paranoid and distrustful of others. After quarantine is declared, blindsided locals suffer through various stages of grief as they are deprived of basic forms of communication with the outside world. The doctor confers with colleagues and local officials, presenting his findings and pushing the latter to close Oran before the disease decimates the city’s populace.Īfter a heady altercation over semantics, the authorities agree to place Oran under quarantine. Rieux quickly snaps into reality and, in studying the disease’s symptoms and patterns, determines that a plague has hit Oran. Eventually, however, the proliferation of dying animals can no longer be ignored, especially when people begin to fall ill and die. Rieux, a local doctor, also initially fails to give the dying rats a second thought as he makes his daily rounds and prepares to send his ailing wife to a local sanatorium. Populated by bored, money-obsessed people entrenched in their habits, Oran and its people resist believing that something is amiss as plague-infected rats suddenly appear around town, parading their imminent death. The city, an unattractive and unremarkable place on the Mediterranean coast of French colonial Algeria, is known for its rapid shifts in temperature. The narrator opens by painting the novel’s setting: Oran in the spring of an unspecified year in the 1940s. The narrator-who by the book’s close reveals himself to be Bernard Rieux, the novel’s protagonist-justifies his anonymity by his vow to maintain objectivity throughout this “chronicle” of Oran’s plague and its effects on the city’s populace.
This consideration, coupled with the work’s straightforward, somber title, foreshadows a tale of tragic proportions.
The Plague, whose linear chronological narrative is presented by an initially unidentified, omniscient third-person narrator, unfurls in five parts, following the structure of a Greek tragedy.
0 kommentar(er)
