Term Paper

 

Veronica Ucros

30 April 2013

4^th Period

The Plague Term Paper

The Plague, a novel by Albert Camus, depicts an accurate portrayal of how people react in masses as opposed to as individuals. By making the narrator one of the characters in the novel, the reader has insight into what a couple of individuals are doing and thinking as well as what the whole town’s situation is at that particular moment in time. Analyzing the citizens of the city in which The Plague takes place in with social psychology proves that although the novel was published in 1948, many of the basic ideas and observations hold true of humans in the 21^st century.

The people that live in the Algerian town called Oran can be seen as an individual. They have a collective personality, opinion that develops and shifts as their circumstances change. The collective personality of the citizens of Oran at the beginning of the novel is one of humdrum productiveness. They all live to work, they commute, they do their jobs, they get married, have a family, continue to work and die. The city is not lively, it has no vibrant night life, no scandals just a few individuals here and there that, like bad apples, get in the way with their humanness. Then the rats started dying.

The universal opinion au debut of the rat carcasses that littered the street? They believed that it was gross and an inconvenience, after a while they even paid no mind to it, the city just devised a strategy to get them out of the way and it kept on functioning, like a well-oiled machine. Then one person got infected, bumps emerged on their skin, fever, pain, death, the government refused to quarantine a member of society based on only speculations of a disease. How were they to stall the flow of the economy for a silly little infection? They say that the government reflects the people they represent, and like the people of Oran, they brushed it off and continued with their jobs. More and more people began to get infected, and the citizens started to stress and worry. The government issued a town-wide quarantine. People then actually started to worry, but even then the general reaction was an intense desire for the people who lived outside of Oran, people who, under normal circumstances, were not of much importance. There was a resistance though; the people of Oran tried to stick to their routines even after the quarantine, obviously to no avail. They eventually do realize that they are doomed and start doing things that would help them out in the long run.

The description of the town’s relationship with religion also changes with time. At the beginning of the novel the people of Oran did not really believe in anything. They believed in themselves and placed the locus of control within themselves. If they wanted a promotion, they would work for it instead of sitting down and praying to God for a miracle. An excellent example of this type of thinking is Dr. Rieux, the doctor of Oran and the narrator of the novel, which is an atheist. During one of his conversations with Rambert, another inhabitant of Oran, Rieux starts speaking of how it is his lack of faith in a God that propels him to save and help people. He feels that if he does not do his job as a doctor, no other superior begin will come and do his job for him. Contrary to the mind-set that Dr. Rieux, an individual, maintains throughout the plague, during the outbreaks of the plague, the people began to attend religious sermons as a type of safety net. They went to church and prayed because they wanted to exhaust any option that they had at salvation. Also placing the pressure and blame on something bigger, something mysterious and supernatural was much more readily accepted than placing it on themselves. During the sermons, the priest Father Paneloux blames the citizens’ lack of religious affinity for the plague; he tells them that it is God’s punishment and that they should pray. Camus brings forth an interesting point with this sermon. Why, if we pray and worship this all-powerful being, must he bring to the world such hardship and destruction? Does it count to start living a religious life when you are at the brink of death as a form of insurance? This notion is pushed even further when a little boy gets infected with the plague and dies. Even Father Paneloux starts to doubt his own preaching. “He spoke in a gentler, more thoughtful tone than on previous occasion, and several time was noticed to be stumbling over his words. A yet more noteworthy change was that instead of saying "you" he now said "we."” (Camus, p.222) After having experienced more personal encounters with the plague Father Paneloux, who always blamed the citizens of Oran and not himself, began to realize that the plague was very real, not just some mythical thing sent to teach bad people a lesson. No, the plague was there in Oran and it was there for all of them including him. This inclusion in the problem made him a more compelling speaker and character.

Death is also a complicated situation with the citizens of Oran. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator tells the readers that Oran is different to other cities because of the “discomfort one may experience there in dying” (Camus, p.5) which is ironic because of the events that occur shortly after. Oran goes from a place which is uncomfortable to die in; to a place which it is ignored to a place in which it is panicked and leveling off at a place in which death is no new news. What is interesting from the novel is that the people go through the cycle of emotions when the rats die as well as when the people start to die. Camus might be suggesting something greater than just the adaptation to death, he is hinting at the adaptation-level phenomenon that all humans experience as a consequence of having memory. Humans adapt quickly to situations and they become desensitized through exposure to certain things. The people of Oran become desensitized by the constant exposure to death just like children nowadays become desensitized to guns and killing due to the constant exposure to violent video games and sensationalist media. 
         Regardless of Camus’s motives or sources of inspiration for the novel, it is safe to say that he captured a somewhat timeless still of human interaction and behavior in The Plague. The bland inhabitants of Oran were his blank canvas which he dotted and added hints of color by his unique characters that stood apart from the white masses. The actual plague placed the people, his canvas, in a situation that made them react organically, within their own limitations. The genuineness of his descriptions, his characters, and their actions make The Plague a novel applicable to any group of people in a situation of high stress.

Works Cited

Camus, Albert, and Stuart Gilbert. The Plague. 1st American ed. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1948. Print.