Dr Bernard Rieux

Rieux is where Wayfarism and Camus meet. The Myth of Sisyphus says how to hold the Absurd. The Plague shows a man with a Tuesday. The town of Oran is sealed, the rats have died, the people have begun to, and Rieux is a doctor. So he does his rounds.

He does not believe he will win. He says his victories will never be lasting, and that the plague means, for him, a never-ending defeat. He does not believe God will help, and declines the priest's consolations without contempt. What he has is a job and a refusal to stop doing it. Asked what drives him, he reaches for no grand word. He calls it common decency, and says that in his case it consists of doing his job.

This is the Chosen Cause in its plainest form: chosen with open eyes, committed to without illusion, fought for knowing it may not be won. No authority in the universe endorses the fight. The plague withdraws in the end for reasons of its own, and Rieux knows the bacillus never dies. He has not saved the city. He has spent a year lancing buboes and counting the dead.

The mastery is there too, unshowy: medicine practised when it has almost nothing to offer. And the transmission is the book itself. At the end Rieux reveals himself as the narrator. He has written the chronicle so that some record should remain of what was done to these people, and to say what one learns in a time of pestilence: that there is more to admire in men than to despise.

What he lacks is Levity. Rieux is tired for three hundred pages, and Camus lets him be. It is the best argument in literature for the fourth pillar: this is what the road costs without it.

The plague is not defeated. The rounds are done anyway.