The Plague

Albert Camus's The Plague is appealing mostly because the two central heroes, Rieux and Tarrou, refuse to consider themselves heroes. Not in the name of heroism or love, but in the name of common decency, they work steadily to heal the sick and fight death in the face of "a never ending defeat." Both are stricken with an intense sense of honesty about what little they know and what little they can do. Rieux is baffled by radio announcements that come in from outside the city, "Oran, we are with you!" as though the outsiders can claim that they would live and die with those in Oran. He hates any kind of presumptuousness.
On the other hand, Rambert, who starts out a selfish lover who wants to escape the city illegally, accuses the doctor of living "in a world of abstractions" that are "divorced from reality," that if personal happiness is ignored over public good, a man can't truly be happy. He points out that "public welfare is merely the sum total of the private welfares of each of us." Rieux agrees with Rambert and can't help but encourage him to escape the city to join his wife. Yet somewhere along the way, Rambert loses "love's egoism," and decides to stay and help.
As another contrast, after the horrific scene in which the principle characters witness a child's death, Father Paneloux preaches a sermon, stating that we must either utterly reject God's will or totally embrace it. "The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours." Father Paneloux's way of identifying with Christ and the dead child is to acquire a sympathetic illness to the plague and die of it. To him, God is just in his identification with suffering, and I think Camus would be right to criticize Christianity if that is all that it was. Jesus' death on the cross was far more than God's identification with man's suffering; it was God's way of personally destroying death for people he loved deeply and personally.
To Tarrou though, nothing can make up for the death of an individual. As a child, he was horrified that his father, as a matter of business, oversaw capital punishment. As he makes his way in the world, he realizes that "we can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody." The ultimate good requires "extreme vigilance" in making sure that we do the least amount of harm to others. If he can keep himself from at least killing people willfully, he can think of himself as "an innocent murderer." What a sad existence!
In the end Rieux acknowledges that in all their hard work with the plague victims, the only thing a person could really "yearn for, and sometimes attain . . . is human love." From the beginning, Tarrou manages to live with an interest in the details of other people's lives. In his journal, rather than reporting the "significant" events of the plague, he reports small events such as a man spitting on cats or a woman suddenly flinging a window open and screaming. He is fascinated with poor Cottard, who because of the preoccupation of the police with the plague, has temporarily escaped a criminal investigation. Cottard is the exact opposite of Tarrou. Rieux realises that Cottard has an "ignorant, that is to say, lonely, heart."
I found myself really drawn in by The Plague. I was most moved by the development of Tarrou and Rieux's friendship. The scene in which they go swimming in the ocean one evening at about the worst point of the plague was truly wonderful.