A city sealed shut, a doctor who refuses to look away, and rats falling dead in the streets.
Who drives the story
The doctor who names the plague first and never stops working. He hides the narrator's pen until the last pages, when he owns the chronicle and its verdict on mankind.
A vacationer at the Grand Hotel who turns witness into worker, keeping notebooks and organizing the sanitary squads. He confesses a lifelong hatred of 'legal murder' and dies of the plague he fought.
A Paris journalist trapped far from his girlfriend, who schemes, bribes, and waits to escape, then chooses shame over flight and joins the volunteers.
A Jesuit priest who first calls the plague God's deserved punishment, then is broken by a child's death into a harder, humbler faith. He dies of a 'doubtful case.'
A municipal clerk who keeps the plague's statistics and rewrites one novel's first sentence endlessly. He nearly dies, orders his papers burned, and improbably lives.
A remorseful criminal and failed suicide who gets rich smuggling during the quarantine. When the epidemic ends and normal law returns, he cracks, shoots into the street, and is arrested.
The stern magistrate whose young son is the serum's first failed test. After his quarantine ends he volunteers at the isolation camp to stay near his dead child.
Also in the story
Rieux's older colleague who says the unsayable word, plague, while officials stall. He works on the serum as the epidemic peaks.
How they are connected
A vacationer at the Grand Hotel who turns witness into worker, keeping notebooks and organizing the sanitary squads.
Rieux's older colleague who says the unsayable word, plague, while officials stall.
Go deeper
Absurdity and the refusal to despair · Exile and separation · Collective vs. individual · Religion versus medicine
Themes explainedThe full story act by act, the ending explained and a quick quiz.
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