![]() Eventually, however, the proliferation of dying animals can no longer be ignored, especially when people begin to fall ill and die. Rieux, a local doctor, also initially fails to give the dying rats a second thought as he makes his daily rounds and prepares to send his ailing wife to a local sanatorium. Populated by bored, money-obsessed people entrenched in their habits, Oran and its people resist believing that something is amiss as plague-infected rats suddenly appear around town, parading their imminent death. The city, an unattractive and unremarkable place on the Mediterranean coast of French colonial Algeria, is known for its rapid shifts in temperature. The narrator opens by painting the novel’s setting: Oran in the spring of an unspecified year in the 1940s. The narrator-who by the book’s close reveals himself to be Bernard Rieux, the novel’s protagonist-justifies his anonymity by his vow to maintain objectivity throughout this “chronicle” of Oran’s plague and its effects on the city’s populace. ![]() ![]() This consideration, coupled with the work’s straightforward, somber title, foreshadows a tale of tragic proportions. ![]() The Plague, whose linear chronological narrative is presented by an initially unidentified, omniscient third-person narrator, unfurls in five parts, following the structure of a Greek tragedy. ![]()
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