The Plague: Part One

Pre-Reading Reflection Prompt

Before you start reading the novel, take some time to jot down, journal, or illustrate your answers to the following question:

Where you hear or read the word “plague,” what comes to mind – sights, sounds, scents, images, feelings, experiences, places, etc.?

Part I

1. In his wonderful book of little essays on the many dimensions of fiction, The Art of Fiction, the novelist David Lodge writes the following:
   

   A real  event may be -- and usually is -- experienced by more than one person simultaneously. Prose fiction can give different perspectives on the same event -- but only one at a time. Usually it privileges just one or two of the possible "points of view" from which a story can be told. Totally objective, impersonal narration, even if it were possible to achieve, would not have much human interest.
   
   The choice of the point(s) of view is perhaps the most important decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the characters and their actions.

   
   The Plague begins with what seems at first to be a classic case of third-person narration. By the end of the second paragraph, though, the narrator is speaking confidently in the first-person plural: “we have deluges of mud,” “our little town,” “our citizens work hard,” etc. Then at the close of the opening chapter, the narrator informs us directly that he or she is a member of the community, and a direct witness to the events described; however, he or she has chosen to withhold his or her name, and will speak as a “historian.”
   
   • What do you make of this decision on the narrator’s part? And of Camus’s part in setting up the narration this way?
   • How does the shifting attention to different characters’ perspectives affect our experience in this first and the subsequent parts?
2. The narrator of The Plague mentions that he is writing as a historian, chronicling the events that took place.
   •  What if you kept a chronicle of your reading experience and journaled about the images, feelings, thoughts, and questions that arise – questions you might have for a specific character, for the narrator, for Camus, for God? 
     
     If you feel comfortable using another medium of expression, how might you express what arises as you read using sound, drama/dance/movement, or art (whether it’s using color, making marks on paper, using material, clay, or images).
3. In the early pages of the book (5), Camus describes the experience of dying in Oran.
   • What stands out to you about this description?
   • What does the author mean by “modern death”? As you read through the book note how the attitude and experience of death and dying develops as the plague takes hold.
4. Rieux reflects on the “great plagues” of the past (38–39).
   • How are these past plagues described?
   • Where does his reflection lead him and how, at all, does it affect his view of his current task grappling with the developing epidemic?
5. Part I is pretty graphic in its description of the plague’s onset.
   • How does this matter of fact but graphic telling shape your responses to the characters and the scene?

General Reading Questions Next: Part Two