Life or Death in "The Plague"

For instance, Father Paneloux is on the case of the law, seeing the hatred as just punishment to his group for their sins. Because the suffering he sees is so terrible, he shifts his view so that he incorporates suffering into the will of God and into the absolute nice represented by God. Joseph Grand, the gray civil servant, is on the perspective of grace, for he volunteers without giving it a second thought and battles the crime to protect his city. He does what the priest should do, and he does it without retrieveing or so it or its meaning. Dr. Rieux is another who serves on the side of grace. He is a healer who also never considers his own safety scarcely merely does his job. Indeed, for Camus simply doing one's job is a statement of a form of value and of faith, and such statements are altogether the more(prenominal) powerful in a world where most give glum to live up to their role in civilized society.

Camus makes Oran as ordinary and uninspiring as possible:

The townspeople itself, permit us admit, is ugly. It has a smug, placid air, and you need time to identify what it is that makes it different (3).

What makes Oran different is the plague. More broadly, Camus says that what sets this town apart is the hassle people have there in dying:

being ill is never agreeable, but there are towns that jump by you, so to speak,. when you are sick; in which you can, aft(prenominal) a fashion, let yourself go. . . But at Oran the violent ex

Yet this is precisely the wander to which the plague comes to bring illness to the masses, an illness that makes them feel out of place in such surroundings.

But Rieux was thinking of Cottard, and the dull thud of fists belaboring the wretched hu art objects's face haunted him as he went to trounce his old asthma patient. Perhaps it was more painful to think of a guilty man than of a dead man (306).

Rieux sees Cottard as a man given a postpone because the plague has come to town, for Cottard would either have killed himself or been carted complete to prison had the plague not arrived. Cottard seems to realize this himself on more or less level, which explains his anxiety at the possible retreat of the plague.

Rieux's fight against the disease is a natural act by a man trained for just this role, while Cottard has been trained for quite a different role. This makes his decision to join the sanitary squad all the more remarkable except to the degree that it brings him that much adpressed to the plague and its effects. This is Cottard's decision to make, however, and not Rieux's. Indeed, Rieux realizes that he has a genuinely different role:

tremes of temperature, the exigencies of business, the uninspiring surroundings, the sudden nightfalls, and the very genius of its pleasures call for good health. An invalid feels out of it there (5).

Camus, Albert. The Plague. tonic York: Vintage, 1948.

To be an honest witness, it was for him to confine himself mainly to what people did or said and what could be gleaned from documents. Regarding his personal troubles and his long suspense, his duty was to suffer his peace. . . But there was at least one of our townspeople for whom Dr. Rieux could not speak, the man of whom Tarrou said one day to Rieux,: "His sole(prenominal) real crime is that of having in his heart approved of something that killed off men, women, and children. . ." (302).

The plague against which Rieux fights is both an external evil visited on this town and a manifestation of t
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