The Plague: Ending
It was finally releaved at the beginning of page 301 that "...this seems to be the moment for Dr. Benard Rieux to confess that he is the narrator". It wasn't that surprising but at the same time I was kind of surprised--it doesn't make sense but maybe that's because I was just a bit excited that the narrator was finally revealed. The narrator showed the reader Rieux's thoughts which was a bit questionable if the narrator weren't to be Rieux himself because he was the only character that the narrator went into the mind of in the story. He says that he tried to be as objective as possible but he wasn't perfectly objective because in my opinion its almost impossible to have a totally objective account and individual experiences can affect the way someone views something.
I also want to continue expanding on the idea (from my last blog post) of how there are connections between the covid pandemic and the plague from The Plague. As the book continued, it seemed to me that the most noticeable connection was the ignorance and denial of the spreading disease in both situations. Whether it may just be sheer ignorance or downplaying a virus/disease out of fear, it is a trend for both situations that lead to a larger wave of issues or panic. Just like the CDC did, people including Dr. Rieux in the book warned about the oncoming disease but it was brushed off, doubted, and ignored, until the affects of the disease took its toll and people started to realize that it was serious. Reading this during a pandemic was definitely an experience and I think this book brought to light what can really happen during a situation like what we are going through now (although in some ways slightly different).
As we discussed in class, Rieux has a pretty clear reason for wanting to be anonymous (although, I do agree with you that he wasn't entirely successful, as most of us believed the narrator was Rieux from the start). He wanted to create an objective account of events, but ended up giving a lot of personal thoughts in his story as well, making it feel like it was being told from the perspective of Rieux, even though he was talking about himself in the third person.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is no such thing as a completely unbiased narrator. Rieux does do a decent job with narrating the story in a way that wasn't overly opinionated (probably due to his status as a doctor), but even so we only hear his thoughts. It is also easy to tell that he is the narrator from early on considering how it primarily follows his omniscience. I don't personally think the story would have changed all that much if he had been open about being the narrator from the beginning, but I found it to be an interesting stylistic choice nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteYeah there were a lot of similarities in how long it took to take Covid and the disease in The Plague seriously. It's also interesting how in the book the city refused to call the outbreak a plague until it was well under way. I don't recall the same thing happening with Covid - big organizations like the WHO announced it was a global pandemic pretty early on, but even with that title it still took a while for people, at least from what I saw, to realize that this was going to dramatically change our lives for a long time.
ReplyDeleteYea I was kind of lost in all of the narrator business in the beginning as well but I sort of just skimmed past lol. But I definitely agree with what you're saying about Covid and the plague, I thought it was pretty interesting (and also pretty depressing) how many things were almost identical between the two cases, especially in regard to public response. I actually wrote about it in my final essay. I pointed out how Trump and his administration in specific (as well as like meme pages) neglected to take the virus serious, and compared those to the random guy in the beginning who made the rats problem seem like it wasn't a big deal. Anyway yea good post.
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