Albert Camus: The Plague

As strong is this book, it could stand on its on simply on its surface merit. That is to say, a riveting if morbid account of the spread of Bubonic Plague through a small town in Africa. The characterization and pacing are especially strong, and the work is a refined piece of literature. So strong, in fact, that it is tempting to leave it there and move on.

Which may be why Camus chose to tip his hand in the epigraph and encourage the reader to look a little closer:

"It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by what which exists not!" ~ Daniel Defoe

Thus does Camus to declare his ambition to write more than a flawless narrative, and dive into an allegorical representation. Simply replace "imprisonment" in Defoe's words with "plague," and you have nearly unraveled Camus' meaning.

But the question remains, for what sort of plague is his literal plague a metaphor? It is pretty evident from his focus throughout that he means to represent the fatal separation of all mankind from each other, for it is that psychological aspect of the event that he treats, almost to the exclusion of all others. The word "isolation" is ubiquitous, clearly not due to Camus' limited lexicon.

And it is revealed over the course of the story that the plague does not cause the isolation; it simply reveals an isolation that already existed in the lives of all. The conscience of the story, Tarrou, remarks, "everyone's always cut off from everyone else", not as a result of the plague, but of their consciences (172). Later, this same character cements the connection between plague and isolation in his final diatribe, as he uses "plague" to describe his entire life, irrespective of the literal disease. "I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years," he observes, recounting his life. "What does that mean--'plague'--just life. No more than that" (222, 270).

And so it is in Camus' world. Men are incurably isolated from one another--not by choice, but from birth. Those to whom we think we are connected, with whom we experience the illusion of intimacy, are always separated from us. We never truly know another, and sadly, there is some truth in what he proposes. I, for one, take Woolf's view that we are indeed leaves floating blinding in a stream, but that we occasionally, in blessed moments, manage to bump into each other (A Room of One's Own).