The Plague

As the plague rages on throughout August, Oran’s hottest month, the plague-fighters continue in their joint efforts, working under the guise that they are agents of free will. There comes a point, however, in which the plague, having “swallowed up everything and everyone” (82), creates a collective destiny in which individuals cease to exist. This shift from individual to collective occurs in the narrative as well. During this noticeably shorter central section of the novel, none of the characters interact or exchange philosophical musings as before, as they are completely engaged in fighting against death by plague, which reaches its culminating point. Oran’s surviving residents physically and emotionally waste away; memory and imagination fail them as they fall into a habitual monotony that renders them emotionless bodies incapable of meaningful discourse. All they can do is mark the time, read the news, and hope for normalcy.

In a sense, the disease’s lack of differentiation among victims effectuates an ironic redressing of the social justice system. Oran’s people, normally separated by class and profession, become an indiscriminate mass as all the hierarchies that typically divide them dissolve. Moving from the poorer suburbs to Oran’s more affluent center, the plague finally hits the city’s wealthier citizens, who have heretofore enjoyed relative freedom from the plague’s devastation; now it is “their turn” to experience the usurpation of individual freedoms. For this, they blame the weather, notably the violent winds that blow through town for several days. Likewise, in the prison, guards and prisoners alike fall victim to plague death. As the pestilence dismantles Oran’s arbitrary divisions, it underscores the absurdity of hierarchies as a foundational system of social organization.

Regarding the fate of the afflicted, the nondifferentiation among human bodies reaches unimaginable limits when cadavers, already reduced to occupying mass graves, are exhumed and shipped to the incinerator as the pits overflow. This last-ditch measure—an effort to avoid jettisoning bodies into the sea—recalls the incineration of Oran’s diseased rats at the novel’s opening. It furthermore bears a resemblance to accounts of crematoria used to dispose of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps.

As quarantine and collective grief force Oranians to confront the absurdity of their situation, some of them fall prey to a form of temporary insanity that incites them to commit acts of violence. Having previously evoked water and wind, the narrator now turns to another potent primary element: fire, which figures literally and lexically in the narrative. High winds cross-contaminate some locals’ minds, creating an “incendiary effect” (84) that spurs them to arson, which they believe might purify their domestic spaces. Some onlookers, themselves victims of emblazed minds, attempt to capitalize on the situation, running into burning houses to seize whatever valuables they can carry away. Ironically, these material items appear to enjoy a loftier status in the pillagers’ minds than their own—and others’—lives.