When I first saw The Plague, I was honestly not expecting it to be about the Bubonic Plague, I figured it would be some weird completely made fantasy plague or something like that, although this might be slightly more interesting as I have actually learned about it in history class freshman year. Of course I do think it is interesting to look at this story while having the perspective of out current pandemic. I do find it slightly odd how they notice that all the rats are dying and do know about the plague and how it is transferred via fleas yet they don't think anything of it. They completely ignore the rats to begin with and even when thousands of rats died while spurting up blood they don't take any precautions and don't even kind of associate it with any kind of disease, much less the plague. The narrating style is also kind of weird, the narrator clearly mentions at the beginning of the book that he is both a third person and first person narrator and I'm okay with that it makes sense and I can understand why its setup like that completely. But he speaks about himself in the third person, referencing himself as the narrator, it just seems kind of odd. I'm also not completely sure how real this story is, because it could be all real, although I don't think it is, it could also be completely fake, although in my opinion it falls somewhere in-between as a fake story based on a real event. I do like the book so far though, it is interesting to look at it while going through this current pandemic, although I know that is why we are reading it to begin with.
From what I've surmised about the book so far, it is definitely a fictional story but I think because it was written in response to the Nazi occupation of France, it needed a sense of grounding which is where I think the bubonic plague comes in as a sense of familiarity. That last bit is my own editorializing, but I don't think it would be completely wrong to assume that Camus didn't want to write something as specific as a plague without some guidance (which the bubonic plague provides in a historical context). Looking at it through the lens of our own plague, I've already spotted some similarities in how people think of an epidemic between today and in the book.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think Camus is building a sort of tension when every character is oblivious to what we as readers know very well is happening. I also agree that I dislike this narration style, it is weird. It feels like he is trying to just read out the events as an objective historian but the way he combines the different sources he is working with is just very awkward.
ReplyDeleteI think it's cool you understand his narration shift back and forth from first to third person. I feel like it probably worked better in his head than on paper because it's less clear when the shift happens. However, in some books, such as "The Hunger Games," this shift works fine. So, maybe it gets more understandable throughout the book.
ReplyDeleteI'm also finding the narration style quite odd. I can't say it's my favorite, it's a bit confusing at times. The thing about the rats struck me as odd as well, I feel like I personally would have had a more severe reaction, and maybe- dare I say- suspected? some sort of disease? Though that's very easy to say with retrospect and I could be completely overestimating my deduction and foresight skills.
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