Book Review: The Plague by Albert Camus
By Joonyoung Heo ’25
Author’s Disclaimer: This article discusses the philosophical coherence of The Plague by Albert Camus and its significance in the modern era. I will reference several plot points, but they will only serve to create a broad, conceptual comprehension of the story. A number of key passages will be taken directly from the text. None of the characters will be mentioned in specific. None of the finer, more important details will be spoiled.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Plague is that the fictional events it chronicles are so similar to the pandemic today. Incidentally, it was a few months into the infamous year of 2020 that I first read this novel, and I was astonished by the parallels I could draw to today’s world. The finer details are different, of course, but the thematic force is all there. The story may take place exclusively in the French Algerian city of Oran, the titular plague confined within its borders and kept from the rest of the world, but it is no less relevant to the pandemic under which we have trudged along for the past two years.
To understand the central motif of the novel and its magnitude in the present day, we need first to understand the author of the novel itself. A work of philosophical fiction, after all, has largely to do with the philosophy of the individual who wrote it. Before I read The Plague, I had occupied myself with The Stranger, another novel by Camus, without really knowing anything about him. It was a mistake; I could enjoy the writing for what it was, but I was frequently confused and occasionally horrified by the sharp turns and abrupt shifts in the story. Going in blind made it easy to misinterpret and misunderstand the stories. Similarly, I don’t think a reader can get nearly as much out of The Plague without knowing something about Camus––especially as the piece is considered by many to demonstrate his philosophy most effectively. He was a truly gifted thinker, and it would be wrong to discount his writing for its singularity.
Camus was a follower of absurdism––a philosophy for whose propagation he was largely responsible. He believed that the search for the meaning of life will inevitably fail because no such meaning exists, and that man’s existence is, in this sense, “absurd.” He believed in the inherently meaningless state of existence, while emphasizing the importance of embracing what our lives have to offer. We ought to accept a meaningless reality for what it is, he argued––really, we have no choice in the matter––and simply live with it. Camus was against the very notion of suicide, which he saw as the ultimate renunciation of human values. An individual must simultaneously accept a world devoid of meaning and defy it by living to the fullest. I find that this absurdist philosophy holds great merit, and that Camus was able to integrate it throughout a cohesive, masterful piece.
Before the first signs of plague are present in the town of Oran, the lives that people lead, I think, are not unlike ours––free, yet firmly tethered. Their lives are dictated subconsciously by their habits, and nothing in the world seems interesting. They live with such dull consistency that monotony would be a better word for it. Certainly there is variety; during the week they make as much money as possible, and on the weekends they love, they go to the cinema, they bathe in the sea. But they engage in these activities so often that variety might as well have ceased to exist, and they take it for granted. The narrator (whose name is revealed only at the end of the novel) tells us that “these habits are not particular to our town; really all our contemporaries are much the same.” Oran is described as a town whose people live without so much as an intimation of its tragedy. Camus, then, directly associates monotony with modernity.
I can’t help but agree with him. The twenty-first century has given us a lot more to do, so much room for variety, yet we are still bored. Just as the townspeople of Oran are chained to the banality of habit, so too we spend each day doing what we did in the last. Those of us who are ambitious either fail to consider or choose to ignore the inherent absence of meaning in their objectives. We plod along in blissful ignorance, perhaps because it is the only thing we know, or perhaps because it is the best we can do.
Everything changes, however, when the rats pour onto the streets and the plague descends upon the town. Many of them try to cling on and act as though nothing has happened, of course, but once Oran is finally quarantined and everyone is prevented from coming and going, the population is forced to abandon the comfort of monotony and forge blindly ahead. Put simply, the status quo is overturned. Lovers and families are separated in an instant and people begin to drop like flies, covered from head to toe in swollen pustules. Yet, despite the suffering of exile and separation that they all share, each individual is alone in his suffering, entirely convinced that such pain is unique to himself. The townspeople see their anguish as distinct from the “common” struggle. Their selfishness drives an atmosphere of utter alienation in a town that has already been isolated from the rest of the world.
Similarly, when the pandemic hit in the last few weeks of 2019, everything was turned upside down. Very few of us could rely on the pattern of monotony that had carried us there. We had to break out of what we knew to do and adapt to jarring change. And, as in Oran, our first instinct had been to believe that we were so special, so removed from “common” suffering, that the pandemic could not possibly affect us. A virus that started in China, we reasoned, could not possibly spread to the West. Had Covid really been contained in China, I suppose we would have sent money, delivered medical supplies, and done some research on the virus––but I doubt we would have done more. At the end of the day, it would have been treated as largely a “you” problem. That Camus could write so accurately of human nature speaks volumes of his philosophical and literary capacity.
As the months pass and the plague seems as though it might thrive in Oran forever, the townspeople begin to come together. The selfishness that drove them from each other dissolves into a collective struggle for freedom. Instead of cowering in their homes, the bravest of their numbers take up posts in the hospital wards alongside the doctors and nurses, and their neighbors start to join. They rise above themselves to fight the plague, running a much higher risk of contagion. Naturally they still languish in sadness and suffering, but “they had ceased to feel their sting.”
Yet, just as in reality, the anti-plague effort is essentially futile. Mortality rates are higher than ever, there are never enough doctors on hand, and a long-awaited cure succeeds only in drawing out the agony of a patient’s death. In fact, the town has gotten better at little more than the efficiency with which it disposes of its mangled corpses. This is the culmination of Camus’s philosophy. The struggle against death, an inevitable wave of something that cannot be outrun, is meaningless because mankind will always lose. You can lock yourself in a quarantine unit and take a dose of every medicinal substance known to the world and not a single thing will change––eventually, we all die. It is both an invariable truth and the reason why Camus argues that acceptance is the only way out.
But this is what I find so appealing about his philosophy: the inherent lack of meaning does not make the struggle worthless. The struggle itself––the will to put up a fight in defiance of futility, as opposed to the cowardice of attempting to flee––makes it meaningful. We see the townspeople of Oran do just that; once they come to terms with the hopelessness of their predicament, many of them choose to help. One of our protagonists, a foreigner, tries for the entire first half of the novel to smuggle himself out of the town, where he “doesn’t belong.” The turning point of the story takes place when he offers to stay and aid the central protagonist, a doctor. Camus presents him as an exemplary character, and for good reason.
Once again I can draw a connection to our pandemic in the present day. It is true that we were rather stubborn early on, blinded to the extent to which it would affect our lives. But, by now, most of us have accepted that the pandemic is not a short-lived phenomenon; it will likely linger for more years to come, and its effects will transcend our generation. Instead of hiding away, we are doing our best to fight the virus. We are trying.
Strikingly, and in the style of philosophical realism for which I adore Camus’s writing, the plague comes naturally to an end for a reason that is never made explicit. It might have been the cold weather that made Oran inhospitable for the plague, but even this is unconfirmed. The one thing we know for certain, however, is that the townspeople are not responsible for their own liberation. While they tried to fight the plague, their efforts were largely unsuccessful and had been on the brink of collapse. In this sense, Camus emphasizes once more that their struggle was meaningless––after all, it wasn’t their handiwork that saved them.
When the plague has finally disappeared and Oran is reopened to the world, we see that plague cannot “come and go without changing anything in men’s hearts.” The townspeople had taken their lives for granted, living in an unconscious loop of habits; now, with the plague gone, they appreciate the devastating power of separation and experience a genuine “overpowering, bewildering joy” at being reunited with their lovers and families. Love, then, is an inherent act of rebellion that defies the absurdity of man.
As our own pandemic is still at large, I cannot discuss the similarities in the present day. Perhaps, if I had to make a prediction, with the technology we have, I could see us succeeding where Oran failed. This is what we’ve done in the past; many diseases have been eradicated, or (at the very least) suppressed, largely through human effort. But our struggle against the pandemic, and against any disease we have known, was only ever a crude extension of our eternal struggle against death––and this latter struggle we can never overcome. I see the plague of Camus’s Oran as a manifestation of the prospect of death we face every day. The meaningless state of life gives rise to an insurmountable uncertainty that makes defiance hopeless, and always doomed to fail.
Yet there is value in trying, and I believe, as Camus did, that putting up a fight is far better than surrendering to the absurdity of mankind.
Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflications, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.
