First 500

In the novel “The Plague” by Albert Camus characters are confined to the city because of a quarantine issued due to a deadly plague consuming the city. This physical confinement affects each character differently. Through each of their struggles both physical and mental it is clear that freedom is not necessarily a physical quality, but a mental capacity. The events that transpire throughout the novel affect each character differently. Were some people truly more free before the gates of Oran closed? Do their struggles with the plague bring this mental freedom to light for each character or do they simply return to their previous ignorance? The confinement that the people of Oran face is not simply the confinement to the city, but the isolation within themselves and from their fellow people that keeps them from truly living their lives. Dr. Rieux is the first character introduced in the novel and we quickly see that he is not a person without troubles. “The telegram informed Rieux that his mother would be arriving the next day. She was going to keep house for her son during his wife’s absence. When the doctor entered his apartment he found the nurse already there. He looked at his wife. She was in a tailor-made suit, and he noticed she had used rouge. He smiled at her.” (10) Before the quarantine even begins Rieux a man without strong connections. He is emotionally isolated; he does not show much love or compassion at all with his wife who he is parting with for some time and this is one principle constraint on his “freedom”. People need to have friends and companions or they go crazy. Even as the novel progresses Rieux maintains this sort of detachment, when he goes to see his patients who have no hope of surviving, instead of providing some comfort he is cold and unemotional. After a while the struggles finally get to him and he talks about his wife “Rieux agreed, merely adding that the long separation was beginning to tell on him, and, what was more, he might have helped his wife to make a good recovery; whereas, as things were, she must be feeling terribly lonely.” (191) In reality Rieux is not any more separated from his wife than he was before the plague, the separation has now just gone from emotion to actual physical separation. Nevertheless, this opening up to Grand is progress as Rieux is finally trusting a friend to talk about his problems, no matter how little he actually opened up and it shows that he is worried about his wife, breaking some of the emotional isolation, and freeing his mind. The physical confinement of the quarantine helps to start to break the previous mental restraints that Rieux burdened himself with. This mental freedom would only be possible with the physical restraint of the plague.