own without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves... ordinariness is what strikes one first about the town of Oran" (3). What the author takes great pains to describe in terms of sterility and ugliness, he also turns on its head by calling ordinary.
Earlier it was mentioned how metaphor is often used to disguise autobiography; in The Plague autobiography serves the purpose of metaphor. Anyone familiar with (or reading about) how life is lived where desert meets sea recognizes at once the accuracy of Camus' description of Oran. At the same time, that very setting places his following narrative apart from the conventional view of a city's life. The conventional view gives a city colors and shadows, variety in multi-headed forms. Oran, the Algerian colonial prefect of Camus' personal knowledge, is like a city put under a literal spotlight. Its white sterility recalls the image of a patient on the surgeon's table in the center of a hospital operating theater. Which, of course, is the central metaphor of The Plague: a city quarantined by authorities in order to fight an epidemic of bubonic plague.
An epidemic is an impersonal entity. There are no distinct villains in The Plague because, really, a microbe is a faceless character. One can try to demonize "the enemy," but the task is pretty much hopeless from the start: everyone already knows that being sick is bad. Demonization, a public rallying behind a cause beyond the norm of sentiment, requires a specific face to be drawn on evil. A plague, metaphorically and literally, gives us no such opportunity for recognition.
The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them... [those days] are like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its pa...