“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences…I grant we should add a third category; that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That’s why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victims’ side, so as to reduce the damage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how one attains to the third category; in other words, to peace.” -Tarrou (253-54)
The above quote is one of my favorites as I feel like it is a good representation of the book as a whole, and possibly even what Camus is looking for the reader to get out of the book. The concept of existentialism/absurdism, as I understand it, has to do with living life for the good of the individual and that anything that happens otherwise is out of one’s control. Death is imminent and uncontrollable and also everywhere, so doing what you can to live life not only to the fullest, but also with the best sense of direction in a directionless world seems to be key.
This is where Tarrou seems to have found his direction. By dedicating his life to pull himself out of the “pestilence”, he becomes a “victim” vying for the position of the “true healer”. Still, this position as a victim reminds me an awful lot of the concept of martyrdom, an idea that I don’t tend to think of as especially existentialist, as it means solely living for the good of others while neglecting the self. This is where Rieux steps in. Whereas Tarrou is trying to become a saint with no god, Rieux is holding strong to his anti-hero stance and claiming he is only interested in “being a man”. Both men grasp the idea that everything is an accident, so it is the wise option to try and attain happiness in even the darkest corners of the world. But Rieux is the one who finds satisfaction in his current state without trying to attain anything just out of reach like Tarrou might be trying to do, but what Rambert is certainly trying to do.
The plague itself is also a metaphor for all of human indifference according to Tarrou. He claims, in the context of the above quote, that if one does not acknowledge the suffering going on around them then they are essentially complicit. Henceforth, Tarrou has dedicated his life to battling the rampant violence and ignorance that he was seemingly born into when he was born into a quite well-off family and under the care of his prosecutor father. The fact that Tarrou is constantly working off some amorphous debt reminds me of Christian-esque ideology like the original sin and, connecting to what I talked about before, sainthood and martyrdom.
I think that the obvious connections that could be made between Tarrou’s and Rieux’s albeit similar ideologies are completely valid and necessary to understanding existentialism within The Plague. Though reaching the end of this blog post, I am inclined to say that Rieux’s brand of existentialism is a fairly pure one compared to Tarrou’s, in that Rieux has come to the conclusion of it honestly and through no specific event in his past, but that he has reached it just by believing that a man is to do what he feels he must. Tarrou on the other hand, no matter how similar his beliefs, has gotten to these beliefs through a very different medium of events.
My question is this: does that even matter? Is the fact that Rieux and Tarrou share common ground in their pursuit of happiness and satisfaction and morality enough? Or are the differences that I “uncovered” over the course of this post so great that Tarrou’s ideology should be deemed “impure”?
