A plague strikes the Algerian city of Oran, and the gates close, and the citizens must decide how to live under quarantine. Camus wrote this during the German occupation of France, and the allegory is clear: how do we act when evil arrives and there is no escape? Dr. Rieux, the narrator, offers no heroism, only persistence. The prose is deliberately flat, almost documentary. The ending refuses triumph. We read it differently now, after our own pandemic, but the questions remain: what do we owe each other when death is everywhere? The novel answers: everything.