Why be Anonymous?

    At the ending of the book, we finally learn the identity of the narrator. Dr. Rieux, the main character of this book, is also the narrator. Now, this isn’t really too much of a shocking revelation. We spend so much time with Rieux and so much detail is put into those scenes, it’s hard to imagine anyone else being the narrator. Possibly if Rieux had some sort of diary, but you would expect the narrator to mention referring to Rieux’s diary if he had one as he did with Tarrou. And I know early in the book, we had our suspicions already that the narrator might be Rieux. But why did we just now learn that he’s the narrator?

    For one, by keeping his identity a secret for most of the book, Rieux could provide a more unbiased narrative by distancing himself. Sure, he did rely a lot on his experiences during the plague, but he also made sure to look at those experiences in the bigger picture and look at the experiences of others in the town of Oran. Of course, he can’t remain fully unbiased (just take a look at his description of Oran at the beginning of the book) but this approach allows for him to lay out his own experiences as just one of the pieces of information in this broader narrative.

    Another possibility was that it would be easier for Rieux to narrate if he distanced himself from the events that he narrates. Because of his role in the plague as a doctor, he most likely has a lot of troubling memories from that time. If he remains an anonymous narrator, he can distance himself more from these past events.

    Also, if we knew that the narrator was a character in the book, that has the potential to be distracting. It would depend on how he would structure it, but considering Rieux is trying to present not just his own experience but others as well, the fact that the narrator is Rieux could become diverting from the actual content of the narration. Sure, over time the reader would become more used to the fact that the narrator is Rieux and Rieux is the narrator, but just remaining anonymous lessen those distractions. Of course, we wondered who the narrator was, but we also knew that the narrator would reveal themselves at some point.

    Or I suppose it could be a combination of these possibilities or none of them. What do you think of Rieux as the narrator? Why do you think he kept his identity a secret?

Delayed Action

    I think that we can all agree that The Plague features quite a few similarities to our present situation. Something that I found particularly interesting was how the authorities remained reluctant to admit that the illness was the plague (despite the evidence shown) and prolonged their actions to try to contain it. On page 50, Dr. Rieux told the group that “there’s a risk that half the population may be wiped out,” yet that does not elicit a true response from the authorities as they still hesitated whether or not what was happening could truly be a plague. At first, they only put up “small official notices…in places where they would not attract much attention” (51). So while they were taking some sort of action, the authorities were very clearly trying to limit the reach of these notices instead of trying to get the public to know what was going on. And these notices merely referred to the plague as a “malignant fever,” which feels like a simplification of the plague (51). I know that they were very hesitant to call it the plague as they did not want to sound the false alarm or even acknowledge that they could be facing a plague in their modern times, but they could have still maybe emphasized the severity of it a bit more. It takes until page 63 for the authorities to “Proclaim a state of plague,” which basically sounds like they’re going to go into some sort of lockdown.

    Now for me, this reminds me of how we later learned in the pandemic that the Trump administration learned of the potential dangers of the coronavirus and really did not implement any regulations in response or inform the public. I’m sure that many of you have seen some of the estimates of how many lives we could have saved if the government had gone into lockdown even just a week earlier. I’m not sure if this will come up later in the book as people look back and think how much different the effects of the plague would have been with a prompter response but it’s an interesting thought. Also, in class we discussed how Oran very much so had a constant routine and schedule to it, so I wonder how they will respond to these new regulations over time. Will they for the most part abide by them and get used to a new normal? Or will they start to rebel over time like some Americans? I definitely can see connections to the beginning of our pandemic and I think it will be interesting how the plague’s later development compares to our experiences.