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.