The Change of Heart

Watching the child suffer and fight death with everything he had deeply affected these two individuals. The child’s “angry death-cry” (216) seemed to create a chorus of suffering throughout the ward: “the wail continued without cease and the other sufferers began to grow restless” (217). Not only did it affect these two people but it affected everyone present – even the other patients infected with the same ailment, because the death of an innocent child is a terrible thing to witness, the ending of a life before the life has even begun. Rieux reacts in a way we see him react to no other death – he cannot stand watching the child suffer. This death causes him to loose faith in the world – something up to this point, even among all the death and suffering he had retained. He exclaims, “I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture” (218). He says, that he cannot love a world were innocent children die torturous deaths. Paneloux, the priest who recently abandoned his theory that the plague was an unstoppable force of god and joined the sanitation squads, is also deeply affected. This is seen by Rieux’s parting comment “What I hate is death and disease, as you well know. And whether you wish it or not we’re allies, facing them and fighting them together… So you see God Himself can’t part us now” (219). When he doesn’t contradict this statement by Rieux, he illustrates his disillusionment as a result of watching the death of this child.