The Plague

Dr. Bernard Rieux, the narrator of Albert Camus's novel The Plague , is a survivor in several senses. He is a doctor; he is a person who lives through the plague that closes off his city for months; and he survives not only his close friend, Tarrou, but also his wife. (As the epidemic ends, Dr. Rieux learns that his wife, who had been in a sanitarium out of town, has died of tuberculosis.) Here is me doctor-survivor's story, as Dr. Rieux chronicles it.

Suddenly in "194_," the plague strikes Oran, Algeria, and the city must be quarantined. All the people trapped there become "prisoners of the plague."^[40] As time passes, Dr. Rieux finds himself numbed to the pain and suffering around him, and his numbing—which is the survivor's psychic numbing—is his only relief. "Rieux had learned that he need no longer steel himself against pity. One grows out of pity when it's useless. And in this feeling that his heart had slowly closed in on itself, the doctor found a solace, his only solace, for the almost unendurable burden of his days."^[41]

As the death toll mounts to nearly seven hundred per week, the doctor and the entire populace suffer from a sense of immersion in death. Because there is no known remedy for the plague, one of the hardest things for Dr. Rieux is that he cannot really help or even try to heal. All he can do is diagnose the disease and then send victims and their families into isolation. And he finds that because he, the doctor, cannot help people, they resent and even hate him.

Sometimes a woman would clutch his sleeve, crying shrilly: "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. How futile was the hatred he saw on faces then! "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.^[42]

When the weekly death toll finally begins to fall, people start to hope once more. To Rieux, they seem to be "setting forth at last, like a shipload of survivors, toward a land of promise."^[43] But the doctor knows that because of their experiences they have been marked by a vision of death they can never erase: "one can't forget everything, however great one's wish to do so; the plague was bound to leave traces . . . in people's hearts."^[44]

The doctor, too, is imprinted with death and, therefore, changed forever. Just as the epidemic is slowing down, his friend Tarrou dies. All day and night the doctor sits by his friend's bed, but he is unable to save him: "This human form, his friend's, . . . was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence, and he could do nothing to avert the wreck."^[45] The night after Tarrou's death, Rieux has the "feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can be an armistice for a mother bereaved of her son or for a man who buried his friend."^[46]

As the novel ends, Dr. Rieux says that the tale he told of the plague "could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight . . . by all who . . . strive their utmost to be healers."^[47] These words capture something essential about the doctor as a survivor. They suggest that, in one way or another, the doctor is a survivor who strives to be a healer and must continue to strive to be one "in the never ending fight." After all, the struggle against disease and death goes on and on, even though the doctor-survivor knows that in the end he cannot be victorious. But it is the struggle that counts, and it is the continual struggle that continually makes the doctor

a survivor, with all the pain and knowledge that that vision implies.