Hi, my name is Monte Johnson, I teach philosophy at the University of California, San Diego.
And this is the second of my lectures on Albert Camus' The Plague (Le Peste) originally published
1947. I'm using the translation of Stuart Gilbert published in 1948.
Part two of
five and in the overall structure, after the
introductory part one which explains that the book is a narrative chronicle of
events over approximately a year of a plague affecting a french colony.
The main characters had been introduced as the main events were narrated in a fairly linear and chronological fashion.
In Part 2 - which begins with the city gates being closed since plague has officially been declared.
At this point the narration slows considerably and becomes much less linear.
There is
in-depth character development in several different ways of Rieux, Tarrou,
Lambert, Grand and Father Pantaloux; in there the descriptions of their initial
responses to the extraordinary
circumstances of the plague. And
especially towards the end of this part we get the most explicitly kind of
philosophical
reflections.
This is by far the longest
part, almost half of the entire
book, and so these
detailed descriptions of characters are going to set up
various changes that happen quite a bit more rapidly in the subsequent parts, and
through
fewer words depict large changes of character.
This part is very long on description and
philosophical digression.
Now the first thing that's described is the
misery of
the stay at home orders and the effects of the quarantine of the city,
which is explicitly compared both to
exile and
prison.
That is, being forcibly confined in a certain place like being in prison and yet even though that's
in your own home.
Feeling like everything
in your home and around it has changed so that you're in a foreign place or exiled from your actual home.
In Part one, the commercial and mercantile character of the town Oran were
emphasized now the description of the abrupt cessation of business activity is used to represent the
despondency of the citizens. The only businesses still making money are those selling alcohol or movie theaters,
which are pathetically packed -
and despite only showing
reruns. And eventually the infrastructure of the whole town; its hospitals, schools,
cemeteries, churches, stadiums, and even subway cars, are
repurposed and
preconceived in order to deal with the plague. So we see this
transformation of the
environment and the world around them and
this violent transformation, how the various characters
respond to it. The people as a whole are also described.
Many of them are cut off from loved ones that they thought they would only be temporarily separated from, and
these make individual appeals for exceptions to the travel restrictions,
but those are always denied by the officials. And so they suffer for this, and their sufferings become
depersonalized because their complaints and sufferings all pull together.
Everybody is in the same boat - everybody has a reason for this not to be happening
in a desire for it not to be happening, but no exceptions can be made.
There is also described universal frustration in
communication, whether it's brief like in the form of
telegrams so (literally telegraphic) speech or
when people at length attempt to handwrite love letters. All of these attempts seem
to fail, even consolation from one's neighbors become
impossible. You try to unburden yourself about something you're suffering to your neighbor
but the response - inevitably his experience is hurtful - and
leaves you regretting that you even mentioned it to them.
So people are simultaneously tied to one another, but also cut off from one another.
People
try to improve themselves in their relation to
others such as; they're missing partners, or parents, or children, and they try to become the parents that they never were
or treat their parents like they haven't to this point or treat their wives or husbands differently. But the
increased concern for these people actually has a compounding kind of depressive effect, and people prove unable to
authentically carry this out.
The plague is compared to bringing the entire town into a kind of exile,
which again is a paradoxical idea - they're trapped in the town and yet
exiled
from it. So one either dwells in the past or
has a desire to speed up the present, but there's no clear
imagination of the future possible; or to the extent that it is this imagination is rapidly overtaken by fear.
"Hostile to the past,
impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we are very much like those whom men's justice, or hatred,
forces to live behind prison bars".
By the way, the
alternative working title for The Plague at one point was the prisoners and the idea was going to be that were focused on the
prisoners, the people who are cast into this situation
and
trapped where they are. And that title would have brought out,
I think even better than the title The Plague, the focus on
the differential effects on different kinds of
characters as a result of the fundamental cause of the plague.
Now at first there was intense speculation about how long the plague will last, but
people finally get over doing that because
they will bitterly resign themselves to some finite period of suffering, but then inevitably be
disappointed when it's realized that no end or limit can be imposed on the plague. As
it were, it operates on its own time and
you can't predetermine it beforehand and
so they; "drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and
sterile memories". Dwelling in the past and unable to
escape an unending future, which does not allow them to imagine
an unending present, which does not allow them to imagine any future.
Now the character developments. First of all, fundamentally two
unhappy characters. Unhappy philosophically,
unsuccessful characters,
Cottard, his personality is increasingly
disturbing and ultimately climaxes in his self-destruction
but until the last part of the book he actually
seems to be getting ever fitter and better by contrast to everyone else in the town.
He seems to be flourishing in an environment where everybody else walks around as if under a death sentence.
And it's initially unclear why this is but it turns out that he's happy to be escaping justice.
His secret is a crime in the past
which the absorbing circumstances of the present allow him to temporarily escape.
But in the end he's driven mad and into a suicidal frenzy by his own fear of
punishment and death.
Rambert,
the journalist, is miserable upon being separated from his
lover and girlfriend and he feels emotionally trapped here in Oran.
So he, for example, requests that Dr
Rieux give him a certificate stating that he doesn't have the disease so that he can leave. Of course Rieux
refuses, because even though he sympathizes with the desire to rejoin a separated lover,
recalled that Rieux had sent his wife to a mountain sanitarium.
Rieux complies with the letter of the law.
The law was the law. Plague had broken out and he could only do what had to be done.
Rambert eventually will overcome his obsessive drive to escape and
actually improves as a person by using reason and focusing on helping others instead of dwelling on his own
passions. But for a long time, and
Increasingly through
Part 2 - but then into other parts of the book - he is
frustrated as he's driven by an obsessive
desire and
not using his reason.
By contrast two very different,
as it were, happy characters, philosophically happy characters
Grand his
constant talkativeness bears out the image of the citizens that are dwelling in their past. He starts out as somebody
dwelling on regrets about his ex-wife, a failure that he can't seem to put behind him.
He's an amateur writer, who's literally stuck on the first sentence of a romantic novel, that he seems
obviously incapable of writing, because of his lack of genuine feeling and experience with the subject matter.
But as he diverts more and more of his focus away
from those who have been more fortunate than him, in his career, in his love life, and so forth.
And he focuses instead on the plague, and its victims.
He improves as a person. Eventually this is symbolized by his
overcoming and breaking through writer's block.
The
steadiness of his character throughout and his straightforward humility,
usefulness, and efficiency in the context of the crisis allows him not only to survive -
he actually
contracts the plague but survives it. But he actually flourishes after this and the narrator at one point describes him as
an enigmatic mystery, but also is the ironic hero of the novel.
Ironic because the narrator explicitly rejects the very idea of heroes and he says; you know, we normally would think of
them as extraordinary, super-powered
people.
But in fact, it's just the reliable person who does his job, and
has the courage to stand his line - in the
context of a crisis, that is the closest thing we have to
such a hero, ironically
now.
Tarrou is the other kind of happy character.
A
traveler or even wanderer who like Rambert is accidentally exiled in Oran.
But unlike Rambert, he courageously
takes the initiative of setting up squads of volunteers to help with the plague - in high-risk jobs
like; transporting dead bodies, and monitoring affected areas, and so forth. So he acts as a kind of moral conscience,
goading others to join these volunteer efforts, risky though they are.
Some he's unsuccessful in recruiting like Cottard, but others
he's successful. Grand and Rambert, and
his recruitment of them and their agreement to help with that eventually improves them, and helps them.
Tarrou's own motive is
self-consciously philosophical. He is trying to avoid doing harm to any other being
whatsoever, as comes out in a long
philosophical discourse in a later part. In particular he's concerned about having any connection
with death or
murder
but
he remains a subtle observer and judge of the
actions of others in the novel.
So his notes serve as a basis for large parts of the narration, and he constantly takes delight in the ironies that he
observes and records.
Now the first discussion of religion comes
when,
after the first month of the plague, which ends gloomily. And
there is a kind of violent recrudescence of the epidemic that coincides with a dramatic
sermon preached by Father Pantalous
Father Pantalous  is
represented as being a serious scholar.
He works on ancient inscriptions, for example
and he is a thinker. So he gave a famous series of lectures on modern individualism -
he's described as a "champion of Christian doctrine at its most precise and
purest". So he's a serious intellectual who dwells
completely with reason on abstract things and has accepted a set of dogmatic commitments on the basis of his
reasoning. And we see his reasoning ultimately challenged and began to unravel in other parts of the book.
Now the commercial people of Oran, like everywhere,
were not particularly disposed to
religion
per se, but plague had induced in them a curious frame of mind as remote from
indifference as from fervor. The best name to give it perhaps might be objectivity.
So they have a kind of; well, it can't do any harm so I may as well
show up to church just in case there's anything to this and so they
listen to and are subjected to the sermon.
Now the narrator and Tarrou  compared the
religious responses to something like this; to the ancient Chinese practice of playing tambourines to placate the
demon of the plague.
And they asked whether this
religion and this religious response has any chance of being more effective.
But at the same time they raised the skeptical question of whether the prophylactic measures and the medicine
that they're undertaking can be any more effective and there have certainly been
times where the medical response to plague was no more effective than the
religious response, or any other response to the plague. And the
characters at this point wonder whether they are in such a situation.
now Pantaloux's sermon begins by saying calamity has come upon you and you
deserved it. And this is the gist of his whole discourse, that they are suffering a divine
punishment.
The plague in Egypt has described an exodus,
that was wielded in order to strike down the enemies of God as compared to what's happening to them.
He threatens that Lucifer shining like evil's very self will strike down
unjust people with the plague. And that no earthly power, not even the vaunted might of human science can stop it.
He sets up religious concerns as the primary one and acts to instill a fear of death and a fear of
God.
God, he says must be placated by spending more time worshipping him and not just on Sundays. He
identifies the plague with their salvation. Then as if it's a good thing "the same pestilence
which is slaying you works for your good and points your path". He even expresses
partial admiration for the Abyssinian Christians who "saw in the plague sure and
god-sent means of winning eternal life". And so they
inflicted themselves with the plague and he says he doesn't exactly encourage that but he praises the zeal of those
monks and he concludes with what seems like a very half-hearted
prayer for love.
Now the predictable response to this is
panic from which it takes a while to recover
so
the immediate effect of the sermon is to increase fear for everyone. Now fear is not just death itself,
but also divine punishment and so
mental illness is on the rise throughout the town as an episode in the street with a staggering violent madman
reveals in Chapter 12.
Now the clerk, Grand, the bureaucrat
earlier who was described as the kind of man unaffected by plague dutifully does his job,
compiling statistics, and shows himself unexpectedly useful. Like a key essential worker, he
seems to be kept leveled by his hobby of writing or rather his obsessive
rewriting of the first line of a novel. Actually
it describes an uncommonly tranquil and beautiful scene, which stands in contrast with the horrific scenes
unfolding around them. And as Rieux reads his Draft he has the feeling of
the town being a world apart and yet Grand is meticulously documenting the infection and
death rates and so
using this literary
preoccupation as a means of diversion and escape.
Now Rambert meanwhile is shown trying to leave the city.
He's
coping with the
spreading panic by pursuing every means of leaving the town. Trying to
appeal to various officials but constantly coming up short, he observes that these officials are
competent people with good intentions, but as regards the plague their competence was practically nil.
he says he classifies them as
into various groups like; the sticklers, the consolers, the VIPs, the triflers, the red-tape merchants, the
overworked, and much harassed officials, and by far the greatest number the traditionalists who just
send him on to another office or recommend another method of dealing with it. So kind of bureaucratic
nightmare.
His hope is raised when the Prefect sends him a form to  fill out asking him about his identity, family, employment
Information, and so forth. He assumes that they're drawing up a list of people to exempt from restrictions,
but it turns out to be plans for the contingency in the event of his death.
They want next-of-kin information and doubtedly financial information in order to recover the
unexpected costs of burial.
Now his reaction to this is despondency. He spends his time wandering from cafe
to cafe, a mere shade among shadows and spends time at the abandoned
railway station and fantasizing about impossible travels while looking at timetables and posters.
The large interior space of this empty railway station can be compared and contrasted
with the interior space of the Cathedral which just was described as being
packed and stuffy on the occasion of Father Pantaloon's sermon.
Now in Chapter 14, a startling increase in the death toll accompanies the
oncoming hot summer weather and the result of this is profound
discouragement. Many people remain indoors and never go outside. Many others do go outside,
refuse to socially distance. They defy
official orders
requiring local officials to constantly take new measures enacting new restrictions and regulations. And
there's a stark contrast between the
outdoor, where we see scorching Sun and growing lawlessness, and
the indoor spaces where shade drawn,
darkness is
affecting helplessness and
resignation.
The plague had killed all colors and vetoed pleasure. He writes.
Now Tarrou
recollections are then
reported through the end of this part and those towards the end seemed very
Epicurean as do his subsequent
conversations with his friend Rieux or so. I will interpret him in the next slides.
So in Tarrou's journal
there is a passage that I've put up here on the slide which contains several elements that are interesting to think of in relation to
Epicureanism.
"At the start of the great heat for some unascertained reason, the evenings found the streets almost empty
but now the least ripple of cooler air brings an
easing of the strain, if not a flutter of hope. Then all stream out into the open to drug
themselves with talking, start arguing or lovemaking and in the last glow of
sunset the town frightened with lovers two by two and loud with voices,
drifts like a helmless ship into the throbbing darkness. In vain a zealous
evangelist with a felt hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd
crying
out;
'God is great and good come unto him'. On the contrary,
they all make haste towards some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God". In
the early days when they thought this epidemic was much like other epidemics, religion held its ground
but once these people realized their instant peril they gave their thoughts to pleasure and
all the hideous fears that stamp their faces in the daytime are
transformed in the fiery
dusty nightfall in a sort of hectic
exaltation and unkempt freedom fevering their blood. And I too am no different
but what matter? Death means nothing to men like me,
it's the event that proves them right.
The first thing is the descriptions of the easing of pain and the easing of strain and people using
talk and
discussion as a kind of therapy, and
arguing, and befriending people is a way of coping with the situation.
They
do not take notice and do not take
consolation from the
religious
resources and so the cries and the exhortations of the evangelist go unheard.
Religion even begins to fail to be observed at all. And people
become preoccupied with a more primitive and basic concern and that is - pleasure.
Seeking some kind of pleasure to relieve them from the pain and distress and anxiety that they're experiencing on an
everyday basis.
In this context, death means nothing to them and it means nothing to Tarrou
specifically because one has to concentrate on living and surviving in this situation.
Now,
Epicurean aspects of Rieux arguments and his critique of religion. As the plague worsens, the
bobo's hardened and refused to burst and the plague is turning from bubonic plague to pneumonic plague.
Tarrou visits Rieux and they discussed the fact that the plague is getting out of hand.
How the sanitary department is totally unequipped and understaffed to handle the situation.
The prefect refuses to compel help and won't even ask for voluntary help. They're short on imagination.
Officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic,
he says;
now the situation is so desperate
that the city is actually considering using prison labor. But Tarrou, who is vehemically and philosophically
opposed to the death penalty and how he sees that this would essentially be
condemning - forcing people  - to work in the context of a
Plague is an imposition of a kind of death penalty on them.
So he offers to form a voluntary group of helpers, in order to prevent
others from
committing this kind of murder.
The doctor, having no choice,
accepts his offer
but he reminds Tarrou  of the risk and
wants to see if he's serious about understanding the risk. And this prompts a discussion
between the two men Tarrou  and Rieux
about
Pantaloon's
sermon and about religion in general.
Now Rieux rejects the idea of collective punishment, of the plague being a divine punishment -
rejects it out of hand. He says
christians sometimes say that sort of thing without really thinking it. They're better than they seem, he says. But Tarrou  asks
however;
you think like Pantaloon  that the plague has it's good side because it opens men's eyes and forces them to take thought. And
Rioux responds; well, so does every other ill
that flesh is heir to.
What is true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well.
It helps men rise above themselves all
the same
when you see the misery it brings you'd need to be a madman or a coward or stone blind to give in tamely to the
plague. So all
illnesses
improve us in the sense that they force us to
deal with it.
But that we should not try to
convert that into a kind of theodicy and apology for the fact that it's
happened and the fact that it's apparently been imposed by an all-powerful
god.
So explaining why he doesn't say that he believes in God Rieux says;
"Pantaloux  is a of learning, a scholar who hasn't come into contact with death,
that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth - with a capital T.
But every country priest who's heard a man grasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do.
He'd try to relieve human suffering,
before trying to point out its excellence. So the purpose of
therapy is not to further
scare people and
make them think they are responsible for this natural
catastrophe that's happening to them, but to use knowledge, however possible, to relieve human suffering
wherever that's
possible. And
not to
therefore, to give in to, and accept, and
find an excuse, or an apology for the plague because an apology or an excuse for the God that allowed it to happen.
Not to do that, but rather to concentrate everything on relieving human suffering.
This prompts Tarrou  to ask; why do you show such
devotion considering that you don't believe in God? And he thinks that the answer to that question will help him to decide
whether he will join and help
form the voluntary sanitary squads. And the response of this is very
interesting. His face still in shadow Rieux   says that he has already answered; that if he believed an all-powerful God,
he would cease curing the sick and leave that to him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort.
No
not even Pantaloux   who believed that he believed in such a God. And
this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himself on Providence completely.
Anyhow, in this respect Rieux believed himself to be on the right road - in
fighting against creation as he found it. Ah,
Tarrou   remarked, so that's the idea you have of your profession? More or less, and the doctor came back into the light.
So he interprets the point of medicine being to fight
against what's happened by nature. If we look at the plague as a
natural phenomenon, then he's fighting
with the art of medicine against the natural
phenomenon because of the suffering that it brings to humans. If it's a divine
phenomenon, if we have to, if we should believe that first of all,
he denies that we should believe that. That there is a God that would actually impose this as a
punishment or as a purposeful thing or would even allow it to happen.
So we should not believe that and
instead we should use whatever human means possible to fight it as a natural phenomenon.
This gives way to further
Epicurean aspects of Rieux's
views on the world, and death, and God. As he says in another passage from chapter 15,
discussing his chosen profession of medicine. When I entered this profession,
I did it abstractly so to speak, because I had a desire for it.
So he gives a very Epicurean
motivation.
Because it meant a career like another one that young men often aspire to. Perhaps too because it was particularly difficult for a
workman's son, like myself
So he pursues a kind of conventional
path to success,
to fulfilling his basic needs and desires. But then he had to see people die.
Do you know that there are some who refused to die? Have you ever heard a woman scream never with her last gasp?
Well I have and then I saw that I could never get hardened to it.
I was young then and I was outraged by the whole scheme of things.
So the nature of things seemed off to him.
Death alarmed him, caused him fear,
and he described this as being his thought. But subsequently, I grew more modest. Only
I've never managed to get used to seeing people die.
So that's a slightly un-Epicurean aspect of him that he doesn't
fully accept - that death is nothing to him. And in fact, he struggles against it
since the order of the world,
he says is shaped by death, might indeed be better for God if we refuse to believe in him and struggle with all our might
against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where he sits in silence.
So he confines the divine to a sphere that is detached from and utterly
unconnected with human
affairs, exactly as
Epicurus does.
Separating the gods from nature allowing them to remain tranquil, but
leaving humans free in their own sphere to use their art and intelligence and knowledge to
counteract the natural phenomena that threaten them
Now Tarrou and Rieux's developing friendship also reveals some Epicurean aspects. Tarrou  is
impressed by what Rieux just said, and asked him who taught him all this? And he replies that suffering has taught it to him.
It's reflections on suffering that brought him to these views much like the reflections on suffering were a motive for
Epicurus and Lucretius.
Tarrou announces his general agreement with Rieux  and says; in fact, you're perfectly right and
they are friends who share an essentially Epicurean standpoint. The principle doctrines of the Epicureanism
are that number One; don't fear God, because the divine is totally unconcerned with human affairs,
and you're relevant to human reality.
Second, that death is nothing to us because it's total oblivion, and there's no hope for an afterlife.
We've seen that one of them, Tarrou is
much more accepting of this fact than Rieux  is at this point
but Rieux comes to accept this gradually more it seems as
he ages, as he described on the last slide.
Suffering that is chronic can be managed and endured. Epicurus teaches in his own example suffering
that's acute and short-lived is
necessarily limited,
(ultimately by death itself). And this is borne out in the events of the novel
itself.
Now Tarrou
devotes himself to avoiding wrongdoing of any kind whatsoever,
especially that that's connected with murder or death.
Rieux is more concerned with actively relieving suffering and preventing death. Tarrou  has a more passive
character, while Rieux is a constant man of action. They're both devoted to relieving suffering, especially that of others, and
the pursuit offers them both the opportunity to live
tranquilly, and to be successful and even happy characters, even when the world is falling apart all around them.
There is also an intellectualist
aspect of the novel that is expressed most clearly in chapter 16 in the quotation;
"the evil that's in the world always comes of ignorance and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they
lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad;
that, however, isn't the real point but they are more or less ignorant and it is this that we call vice or virtue;
the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore
claims for itself the right to kill.
The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor love without the utmost
clear-sightedness".
So all bad things come from ignorance and all good things come from knowledge.
Therefore ignorant and knowledge are the causes respectively of all
vice and virtue, and thus all unhappiness and
happiness.
To conclude,
reflect on the character developments of both
happy and unhappy people. The examples of happy people being Rieux, Tarrou and Grand and of unhappy people
being Rambert and Cottard and of course as I just explained, that
corresponds to whether they have virtue or vice. And whether they have virtue or vice
corresponds to whether they are essentially ignorant or have knowledge.
Now the narrator
refuses to ascribe to the sanitary groups more than is their due.
That is, the squadron's set up by Tarrou  to voluntarily fill in so that forced
prison labor does not need to be used.
He says; those who
enrolled in the sanitary squads, as they were called, had no such great merit in doing as they did since
they knew it was the only thing to do, and the unthinkable thing
would then have been to have not brought themselves to do it. These groups
enabled our townsfolk to come to grips with the disease and convince them that now that plague was amongst us,
it was up to them to do whatever could be done to fight it. Since plague
became. in this way. some men's duty it revealed itself as what it was;
that is, the concern of all. And
so far so good.
But we do not congratulate a schoolmaster on teaching that two and two make four, though
we may perhaps, congratulate him on choosing
his laudable vocation.
But then again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to save the two and
two make four is punished with death.
In a way, just
willingness to do your job, willingness of healthcare
professionals, for example to do the essential and other essential workers to do what has to be done. And
what simply has to be done, because it has to be done
and for no other reason.
These
people we would not normally congratulate. We don't normally congratulate a
schoolmaster for teaching two plus two equals four, or a grocery worker for bagging groceries, or a nurse
for
helping us treat a disease, even our
doctors - they're just doing their job.
But in the context of a crisis,
it becomes clear that just doing their job is essential to us and
should be
lauded.
The, narrator observes that many fledgling
moralists in those days, were going about the town proclaiming there was nothing to be done and
they should just bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another,
but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude
that a fight must be put up in this way or that and that there must be no bowing down.
The essential thing was to save the greatest number of
persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this
there was only one resource - to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude. It was merely logical.
It was merely logical meaning if you knew the facts about the
situation then what should be done would follow immediately
from them.
Understanding the facts,
overcoming ignorance, having a kind of knowledge,
constitutes being good. And being good
constitutes the character being happy.
More than Rieux or Tarrou, Grand is said to be the true embodiment of the courage that
inspired the sanitary groups.
He does what he's asked to do and
does what must be done because he understands that it must be done and he remains happy and is kept tranquil by
his seemingly trivial literary pursuits.
So the narrator actually says; "if it is absolutely necessary that the narrative should include a hero, the narrator
commends to his readers, with to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit
 
only a little goodness of heart and seemingly absurd ideal. This will render the truth it's due,
to the addition of two plus two to its sum of four, and to
heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness".
He achieves happiness because
he is not ignorant. He has knowledge and therefore
virtue and therefore acts in a
capable, constant, and steady way. And so one who can be happy,
despite the world falling apart around them, and
the fear of death, and the
obsessive pursuit of desire of all the people around him, that person who can be happy is
the hero of the novel, for what that's worth.
By way of contrast considered the situation of Rambert and Cottard and their unhappiness.
Chapter 17 is a counterpart to Chapter 13
which described Rambert's attempts to escape through legal channels?
Chapter 17 focuses on his increasingly desperate struggles to escape and his intanglement with the criminal Cotter.
Rambert's motives are, according to the narrator not virtuous though. They had a kind of point, that is they followed
a kind of reason. Although it was a reason based on ignorance and therefore vice and ultimately produced
unhappiness until a change of the character.
now
Rambert's frustration of failed connections and abandoned attempts to leave are described at great length,
and he's completely driven to get out by his passionate love for the woman from whom he has become separated.
He eventually enlists the help of the criminal Cottard who helps him make arrangements to bribe a guard at the main gate.
Meanwhile, Rieux and Tarrou
continue to battle the plague.
Rambert meets up with Rieux and asks him if the epidemic is getting out of hand - which Rieux responds;
the death graph is rising less deeply
(meaning the curve is being flattened). Still a lot of people are dying
but this can be looked to as being some kind of hope but
they lack the equipment and manpower. So it's becoming a man-made
disaster. Yes, there's the natural disaster, but
it's how people are reacting to and
rising to the occasion or failing to rise to the occasion that are constituting the next stage of the catastrophe.
Rambert is concerned that Rieux
realizes that he's leaving because of his passionate love for his girlfriend and
wants to make sure he doesn't think it's because of his fear of death. "I don't think I'm a coward",
he lamely says. And in fact
his character is chiefly motivated by his passionate love and neurotic desire for his girlfriend as
opposed to Cottard who is more clearly motivated by fear of punishment and death.
So awaiting an opportunity to escape
Rambert drinks with Tarrou and
Rieux who mentioned that he could do good in the sanitary squads. The voluntary groups
he acknowledges this, but says nothing further. Rieux and Tarrou also try to recruit Cottard to the sanitary squads,
but of course he selfishly
refuses saying 'it's not my job'. they confront him with his criminality not
threatening to turn him in to the police, but just challenging his motives. But he doesn't change, and
Part 2 ends with Rambert
calling the doctor and volunteering for the sanitary squad at least until he could find some way of getting out of town.
Rambert is
motivated again by his chronic desire and
erotic love, Cottard by the fear of death and punishment.
But the effect in both of these cases is blamable, vicious behavior.
Since it has earlier been established that ignorance is the cause of vice, it follows that both of them lack knowledge.
They don't accept the facts of what the situation is, from which the need to act in a certain way, immediately follows.
So in the following parts, one of them will learn, and change, and
improve as a result in response to the circumstances - while the other will sink further
into vice, and
madness, and death.
