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.