Teaching The Plague

“The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence,
and by reason of their very duration, great misfortunes are monotonous.”

As an independent teacher, I was eager to make a curriculum shift to my World Literature class this school year. I added Albert Camus’s best-selling novel The Plague because I wondered how my students would see a fictional epidemic.

Why not use our times as a secondary context to the novel?

I was not disappointed by our discussions in September. Though Oran, Algeria, is beset by plague, the novel is relatively static. It is also uniquely ahistorical. It may be set in 1947 but there are no references to World War II. Neither the Arab nor African populations of Oran are mentioned. Centuries of segregation are never described. And then there are the facts. It is not possible for a town to have sustained itself for the period of time described in the novel. Yes, the characters are realistic, but the novel is not.

This unique paradigm, however, lends itself to the timelessness Camus captures. Within the bubble of Oran, Camus’s commentary as narrator allows him to describe the “portents and panic” with searing truth.

As COVID broke out in March and April, The Plague, of course, was referenced and quoted repeatedly. Penguin Classics has already had to reprint it twice this year.

From my class discussions, here are my top timeless quotes:

1. “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise” (37).
2. “Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile...that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire” (71).
3. “For at the precise moment when the residents of the town began to panic, their thoughts were wholly fixed on the person whom they longed to meet again. The egoism of love made them immune to the general distress...Their despair saved them from panic, thus their misfortune had a good side” (76-77).
4. “Many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits as yet” (93).
5. “Thus week by week the prisoners of plague put up what fight they could. Some, like Rambert, contrived to fancy they were still behaving as free men and had the power of choice” (167).
6. “The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration, great misfortunes are monotonous” (179).
7. “'Doctor, you’ll save him, won’t you?' But he wasn’t there for saving life; he was there to order a sick man’s evacuation… ‘You haven’t a heart!’ a woman told him on one occasion. She was wrong; he had one. It saw him through his twenty-hour day, when he hourly watched men dying who were meant to live. It enabled him to start anew each morning. He had just enough heart for that, as things were now” (192-3).
8. [Dr. Rieux] “But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with the saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man” (255).
9. [Rambert] “For the moment he wished to behave like all those others around him who believed, or made believe, that plague can come and go without changing anything in men’s hearts” (295).
10. “Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise” (308).

*all quotations from the Vintage International edition, 1991