Doctor Rieux Role Of The Plague

Albert Camus’ The Plague is an influential existentialist novel that vividly depicts the impact of a plague have on a community. Set in the French Algerian city of Oran in the 1940s but based on the Black Plague that swept Europe in the Middle Ages, Camus draws on a large cast of character to portray and embody the historical impact that the plague on both the populace and society. Uniting the experiences of the various characters is Doctor Rieux, who play the role of a plague chronicler, and in the process demonstrates the impact of the plague on religion, social structures, and community morals.
Doctor Rieux plays the role of a plague chronicler to the plague in Oran. As a lead physician in the city, he is the first to see the coming of

Paneloux is the central authority of religion in the city, someone who the population turn to for guidance during the initial and uncertain stages of the plague. A “stalwart champion of Christian doctrine at its most precise and purest”, he claims that the “plague is the flail of God” to those who have “harden their hearts against him”, a lesson that was “learned by Cain, […] by Job and Pharaoh”. His adherence to scripture does little to comfort the panicking population however, merely increased the tension in the city and, as Rieux records, the numbers of “lunatics at large” who wander the streets “laughing soundlessly [with] faced convulsed” believing that “they had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment”. In the time of crisis, Paneloux and his religion fails to connect and resound with the people, and instead offer them condemnation. Slowly, the church in Oran loses it power: by winter, Rieux notes that the people have “replaced normal religious practices by more or less extravagant superstitions”, such as by wearing “prophylactic medals of St. Roch”. Historically, we see a similar relation between the people and religion in face of the plague. As the church clerics perished in the plague and others left for their rural retreats, the church teachings of condemnation

Rieux records that as the daily deaths increase and the sense of panic in the city rose, a mood of “reckless extravagance” set onto the population: they “spend very freely” on “choice wines [and] the costliest extras”, and “drug themselves with talking, arguing or love-making”. People became idle and wander the streets aimlessly as “[most] shops and a good many offices were closed”. Rieux reflects that once the townspeople “realized their instant peril” to the fatal disease, traditional morals based on religion can no longer hold their ground, and as a result, people “gave [all] their thoughts to pleasure”. Medieval plague chroniclers note a similar trend: that laborers often “simply refused to perform” in face of the horrors of the plague, “preferring to indulge their appetites while they still had the chance”. Traditional family ties were also broken as many came to believe that flight from the cities was the only option; as contemporary writer Giovanni Boccaccio notes in the The Decameron, that suddenly, a “large numbers of men and women” started to “abandoned their homes, their relatives […] and headed for the countryside”. This desperate desire for flight is embodied by Rambert, who tirelessly explored every glimmer of possibility in order to leave the city and be reunited with his wife in Paris, flocks from one government office to another and eventually to