The Plague

As Albert Camus’s The Plague reaches its conclusion, the identity of “the narrator” is finally revealed: “THIS chronicle is drawing to an end, and this seems to be the moment for Dr. Bernard Rieux...

Dr. Bernard Rieux, the unnamed narrator of the novel, begins his story some time in the 1940s in the city of Oran, Algeria. The French port on the Mediterranean is a mix of white, brown, and...

The last sentence of the novel begins with the juxtaposition of the sound of joy "rising from the town" with Rieux's knowledge that their joy will be short-lived. It is a philosophy of despair, one...

We are never told exactly what Rieux’s young wife dies of, but her departure for a sanatorium at the very start of the story suggests that maybe she is suffering from tuberculosis or some similar...

The plague that strikes the town of Oran in France is the symbol of evil in the novel. Like evil, the bacteria that causes the plague lies dormant until conditions are right for it to do its ugly...

As with most of the work by Albert Camus, The Plague is highly critical of organized religion. When a plague hits the Algerian city of Oran, the townspeople are left to live in isolation. Many of...

Separation is of course a central theme in this masterful novel, as the characters in this city become forcibly separated from the rest of the world as they stay in quarantine thanks to the plague...

In The Plague, Camus writes: What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. This essentially answers the question you ask, which is...

Knowing the details of Cottard's past life might provide additional insight into his character. However, the nature of his crime matters less than the influence it has on his current actions. His...

While the novel is not entirely hopeful about people's reactions to adversity, it concludes on a hopeful note. As the death toll from the plague begins to slow, people feel cautious hope. Though...

In The Plague, we learn that the whole city of Oran in Algeria is in the midst of an outbreak of bubonic plague. Dr. Bernard Rieux and another doctor, Dr. Castel, both warn the authorities that...

At the base of modern existential literature is the axiom that “existence precedes essence”; that is, humanity defines itself by its actions and is not pre-designed by a “creator.” The plague...

Published merely three years after the havoc caused by World War II in 1948, Albert Camus's The Plague tells the story about an outbreak of bubonic plague, historically dubbed "the plague" , in a...

The Plague is a novel written by Albert Camus. It was first published in 1947. Through the description of the plague sweeping through a town in Algeria, the author poses several existentialist...

The novel, The Plague by Albert Camus takes place in the 1940s in the Algerian city of Ornan. It deals with a variation of the bubonic plague, which creates havoc and death. There have been many...

Rieux is the narrator of the story, although he does not reveal this to the reader until the end. He disguises his role, speaking of himself in the third person throughout the bulk of the...

Clearly one of the central ideas of this powerful and rather depressing text is that of existentialism and absurdism, which points towards the meaninglessness of life and all that we hold most dear...

What is so interesting about the bleak presentation of human nature in this novel is the way in which Camus presents the various characters in this text reacting to their situation. Rieux, the...

Isotopy consists in the permanence of contextual features ("classemes"), whose variations, instead of destroying the unity of the text, serve to confirm it. The features in question are...

We can link this answer to the literary movement called absurdism, of which this text is a prime example. This movement points out the meaningless nature of life. We can see how this movement is...

In The Plague, the people of Oran are physically restrained. They are walled in the city during the quarantine, cut off from their families, their jobs, and the outside world. Their actions are...