The Seriousness of the Situation

            In this section of the novel no one seems to be taking the plague seriously, despite the rising death tolls. The narrator spends the majority of the section reflecting on how the plague has caused a feeling of exile amongst the general populace as a result of the quarantine of the town. Because the shutting of the town’s gates occurred before it was officially announced, many family members who had left to travel were locked out of the village.  The author describes how many of the inhabitants fell into a seasonal affective disorder without the presence of their families; “citizens became subject to a curious kind of servitude, which put them at the mercy of the sun and rain […] a burst of sunshine was enough to make them seem delighted with the world, while rainy days gave a dark cast to their faces and moods” (75). This feeling came from the new, lonely lives of many individuals, because previously, the “person they were living with held, to some extent, the foreground of their little world” (75). The author describes that the only form of relief from the mental turmoil of the town was “to set the trains running again in one’s imagination, and in filling the silence with the fancied tinkle of a doorbell, in practice obstinately mute” (73). The plagues largest affect on the town seams to be on the people who lost loved ones, “nobody as yet had really acknowledged to himself what the disease connoted” (78), for everyone was to engulfed in their own personal misfortune as a result of separation, as “personal interests […] continued to occupy the foreground of their thoughts” (78). The townspeople seem far to self-centered and fail to realize the large-scale effect this disease could have.