The Plague
Albert Camus(1947)
Extract
What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.
The gates of Oran close without warning, and a city on the Algerian coast becomes a sealed world where rats die in the streets and fever moves from house to house with the patience of a census taker. Albert Camus published this novel in 1947, two years after the liberation of France, and its plague is both literal and figurative, an occupation that reveals what people become when normalcy is revoked. Dr. Rieux tends the sick not from heroism but from decency, that most unspectacular of virtues. The prose is deliberately plain, almost clinical, because catastrophe does not arrive in dramatic language but in the ordinary speech of exhaustion. What remains when the plague lifts is not triumph but the knowledge that the bacillus never dies.
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