Rats as foreshadowing

The rats in themselves are a big foreshadowing of the disaster to come. Starting off one by one they die a gory death and litter the streets with their corpses. The people did not know what to make of these corpses, and doing as people do, they all had an opinion and a theory of what had happened to those rats. Much like the glimpses we get in the first pages of the “fever” going around that ends fatally. People talk amongst themselves, creating rumors and spreading false information. Of the characters presented so far in the novel, only Jean Tarrou has gotten the feeling that the rat deaths were just the beginning of something even worse. He wrote down a conversation between himself and the night watchman of the hotel, which also serves as foreshadowing, about how he was unsure of what disaster was coming, but surely one was imminent. The introduction of death was slow, but it began very early in the novel with the first dead rat spotted by the doctor, then the three that the concierge had found, and it just builds up to 8,000 rats on the street, until the first human life was lost. This deliberate introduction of death in the novel prepares the reader for the full blown epidemic that ensues and makes the reader more “comfortable” with the topic of death.