If you thought hope was lost before, not it’s really gone.

In this section of the novel the narrator talks about how the people of the town cease to care about anything that had previously interested them – income, clothes, social class differentiation. He says that the plague is the ultimate equalizer, for everyone is in the same desperate circumstances as a result of its wrath. The plague does not discriminate, it affects everyone equally. The narrator describes how the town has “lost every trace of a critical spirit, while gaining an air of sang-froid” (183). The plague has crushed all hope the town had: “Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only” (182). The town is populated by an unseeing, listless population. One so thoroughly hopeless and “dominated by the plague that sometimes the one thing they aspired to was the long sleep it brought, and they caught themselves thinking: ‘A good thing if I get the plague and have done with it!’” (183).  Getting the plague, as this quote describes, has become an inevitability. No one bothers to try and protect themselves from it anymore, they have accepted the reality that it is a cruel, unstoppable force of nature, and that all efforts to resist are futile. “The plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even friendship” (182), as everyone has lost hope and accepts that the plague will eventually catch them. They no longer even bother with holding on to loves that had been shattered by the plague, or even friendships – by accepting their inevitable death they accept a life comprised only with a waiting for the peace death brings.