The Plague: Analysis of Setting
"The Plague" by Albert Camus is set in the fictionalized Algerian port city of Oran, which serves as a backdrop for the exploration of existential themes and human struggle during a devastating epidemic. Camus presents Oran as a stark, desolate urban landscape characterized by its lack of natural beauty and a pervasive sense of anonymity. The city's geographical disconnection from the Mediterranean Sea symbolizes a deeper spiritual and emotional isolation, particularly emphasized during the quarantine that restricts residents' movements. Key locations such as Rieux's residence, a makeshift football stadium turned quarantine center, and a cathedral where citizens seek solace highlight the varying responses to the plague and the underlying social dynamics.
The presence of diverse characters, including Rieux, Rambert, and Cottard, reflects the broader societal tensions and moral dilemmas faced during crises. The narrative invites readers to contemplate the absurdity of life and the human condition in the face of suffering. Additionally, the portrayal of Oran's predominantly Muslim population remains understated, presenting an opportunity for further reflection on cultural visibility and representation within the text. Overall, "The Plague" serves as an allegory of resilience amid despair, prompting contemplation of the collective human experience in times of crisis.
The Plague: Analysis of Setting
First published:La Peste, 1947 (English translation, 1948)
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Impressionistic realism
Time of work: 1940’s
Asterisk denotes entries on real places.
Places Discussed
*Oran
*Oran. Algerian port city on the Mediterranean Sea. From its opening paragraphs, The Plague calls attention to the banality, even the ugliness, of the Algerian city in which the events that Rieux chronicles take place. Though the real Oran, where Camus, a native of Algeria, lived from 1941-1942, was not nearly so bleak, Rieux’s city is an ugly, soulless place devoid of trees, pigeons, and gardens and grimly devoted to commerce. Unlike the historical Oran, Rieux’s version is secured by municipal gates, and the official opening of the ramparts at the end of the novel is celebrated by the inhabitants as a kind of liberation.
In the 1940’s, before an anticolonial insurrection brought it independence in 1962, Algeria still constituted part of France, and the relatively large percentage of Oranians of European descent regarded their town as a provincial outpost of French culture. Yet Raymond Rambert, a journalist on assignment from a Parisian newspaper, feels particularly frustrated at being stranded by the local epidemic in distant Oran.
Almost all Camus’s writing accentuates the presence of the sea, the sun, and the sky. Yet, in The Plague, Oran is described as having been built with its back to the sea, without easy access to the cleansing Mediterranean, even under ordinary circumstances. The city’s segregation from the sea is reinforced when, as part of the quarantine, residents are prohibited from wandering to the harbor, and it is a particularly dramatic moment of release when, exhausted by their efforts to contain the plague, Rieux and Jean Tarrou defy regulations and sneak off for a brief, exhilarating swim in the sea.
Rieux’s description of Oran is not very specific, and its majority Muslim population remains invisible. A desolate city of the existential imagination, the quarantined Oran of The Plague functions as an archetype of modern urban anonymity, an arena in which solitary individuals pursue their absurd struggles.
Rieux’s residence
Rieux’s residence (ree-YEW). Rooms in which Rieux lives. After his wife departs for a sanatorium out of town, Rieux’s mother moves in to help him. Several of the novel’s characters, including Tarrou, Cottard, and Rambert, come to speak with Rieux here. Before the plague, which finally kills him, is officially declared, Monsieur Michel, the concierge, spots a dead rat in the building.
Rue Faidherbe
Rue Faidherbe (rew fehd-ehrb). House on the third floor in which Cottard, who makes personal profit out of the general misfortune by trading on the black market, lives. It is in the same apartment that, at the beginning of the novel, Cottard attempts to hang himself and at the end dies resisting arrest. Living in a nearby apartment and struggling through numerous revisions of a sentence he composes is the municipal clerk, Joseph Grand.
Football stadium
Football stadium. Makeshift quarantine center in which Oranians who have been diagnosed with the plague are involuntarily assembled and isolated from the rest of the population. In keeping with Camus’s own reading of the novel as an allegory of resistance against Nazi occupation, the football stadium has been interpreted as analogous to the European concentration camps.
Cathedral
Cathedral. Prodded into piety by the imminence of death, an unusually large number of Oranians congregate here for High Mass on the Sunday concluding the Week of Prayer proclaimed during the first month of the epidemic. It is in the cathedral that Father Paneloux delivers each of his two crucial sermons, in books 2 and 4 of the novel.
Municipal opera house
Municipal opera house. Night after night, a touring company, trapped in Oran by the quarantine, performs the same work, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). On the Friday evening that Rieux and Tarrou happen to go to the opera house together, the singer playing Orfeo dies suddenly, on stage, of the plague.
Bibliography
Amoia, Alba. Albert Camus. New York: Continuum, 1989. An introduction to Camus as an important “Mediterranean” literary figure. In a chapter on The Plague entitled “A Holograph,” the author is particularly attentive to the novel’s coordinates in North Africa.
Fitch, Brian T. The Narcissistic Text: A Reading of Camus’ Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. A sophisticated study of Camus as a metafictionalist. The chapter on The Plague examines how, through the use of several writer figures and by calling attention to its own narrative design, the novel makes its own artifice overt.
Kellman, Steven G., ed. Approaches to Teaching Camus’s “The Plague.” New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. A collection of essays primarily concerned with pedagogical strategies for the college-level study of Camus’ novel. Provides a bibliographical survey and thirteen individual essays that situate the novel within the contexts of French literature, philosophy, medicine, and history.
Kellman, Steven G. “The Plague”: Fiction and Resistance. New York: Twayne, 1993. A general overview, including chronology and bibliography, of Camus’ novel. Discusses the historical, philosophical, and biographical contexts of the work, and provides analyses of its style, structure, characters, and themes.
Tarrow, Susan. Exile from the Kingdom: A Political Rereading of Albert Camus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985. A rereading, in chronological order, of Camus’ journalism and fiction as works that are linked to historical events and as embodiments of his ambivalences about political issues. Includes one chapter on The Plague, entitled “A Totalitarian Universe.”