Understanding The Plague The Plague, written by Albert Camus, is a triumph of literary art. Camus created a commentary on the way humans react to difficult situations and circumstances in his fictional city of Oran, North Africa. Oran is presented to the reader as a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants. Everyone seems to take life for granted. The inhabitants of Oran are constantly driven by business or money and only stop on weekends to enjoy the finer pleasures of life. A pretty accurate parallel to today's world. When a plague epidemic breaks out in Oran, at first no one pays attention. When the problem becomes too big to ignore, the city is caught a bit by surprise and quarantined. The city remains isolated from the outside world for over a year, and when the epidemic reaches its peak, hundreds of people die every day. The main characters of the story are Doctor Rieux, Cottard, Tarrou, Grand and Rambert. Rieux is the narrator (although he does not reveal himself as the narrator until the end of the story). Through Rieux's eyes and Tarrou's diary entries, Camus describes a personal and completely realistic vision of a great catastrophe. The way Camus creates such a quiet literary masterpiece is not by reading death statistics and important events; it is for its attention to the individuals involved in the crisis. The most striking feature of the novel is actually very sublime. The way Camus deals with the unthinkable catastrophe of the plague is actually the opposite of the way the media in today's society reports and enjoys hearing about such catastrophes. It's much easier to deal with disasters with numbers. Today's audiences want to hear a comforting "250 dead today" instead of hearing about the people who died atrociously and the people who love them, forced into quarantine before the bodies are cold. Camus forces the reader to see the brutal reality of the plague, not only in the blood and gore, but also in the subtle and profound changes that occur in the people of Oran. The way Camus does this is through his relentless emphasis on individual people and not the masses of the city as a whole. At the beginning of the novel, people were reluctant to recognize the plague as something that would change their lives. They thought it was simply a passing inconvenience.