After The Plague: Thoughts? Why did Camus right this?

I have to say, I was not as big of a fan of this book as I was The Stranger. However I still think that it is an important book and Camus makes a lot of good points in it. I also have to say that I totally called that the narrator was Rieux. I think the big give away is that Rieux has a very characteristic sort of voice. That of cool logic masking fervent emotion and passion. He is obviously passionate about certain things but very good at not letting the expression of those emotions get in the way of logical goals. The narrator had a very similar tone to me. The whole "I have opinions on what happened but I'm not going to tell them to you overtly." thing. And then ends up conveying his emotions anyway more subtly through his use of language. That was just something I had been thinking about and noticing throughout the book.

It's hard to really say why Camus wrote this. I did just make that post about themes of the book, and obviously those were things he wanted to comment on, and more importantly, have the rest of society be aware of and think about and for their own opinions. I think the book as a whole illustrates some of the same absurdist ideas that The Stranger did. Camus does actually make several allusions to that work throughout The Plague. He goes about it differently though. I think partly Camus wants the readers of this book to get thinking about what they would do in a situation like this and how they would react, looking at the reactions of Camus's characters. And that hopefully leads to deeper thought about human nature in general and our reaction to disaster, and our relationship to the various themes in the book.

The Plague Themes

After finishing The Plague, I'm going to discuss some of the themes of the book. There are really four that my group decided to focus on for our presentation and talked about more in class, but there are many more. This book is pretty multi-layered (like an onion, or an ogre), and I think it's open to a lot of interpretations as far as the main idea of certain sections.
Obviously, death/mortality is a big one. Rambert asks us at a point in the novel if man is an idea. What he's really getting at is what is the lasting effect of the life of one man, and more importantly the death of one man, on everybody else. Camus asks us in The Plague to evaluate our relationship with death, and how it changes when we are surrounded by it. There's a common saying that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of many people is a statistic. I think in The Plague, the citizens of Oran progress through many different stages in coping with the epidemic and the death it brings. It eventually grows from suspicion and disbelief, to horror and fear, to reckless abandon and carelessness. They eventually become very desensitized to the idea of death and many welcome it.
I also think that Cottard plays a big role in establishing the mortality theme. He tries to take his own life before the onset of the plague. We later find out why. But it is effective at illustrating the very different relationships that people can have with death.
Camus wants us to think about that relationship, not only with our own death, but with the death of others. What does it matter if we die? What does it matter if everyone else in the town dies? He's not saying it doesn't matter, he just wants us to really think about it, and what to do about it.