The Plague

Commonplace, filthy, and numerous, rats are not the only animal to figure prominently in the novel, but they are the most significant in that their graphic deaths figure in the work’s opening pages. The widespread demise of rats in Oran portends the surge of plague deaths among the city’s residents. The rats also function as a metaphorical representation of Oran’s general populace, especially people of ill or duplicitous intent, notably Cottard. Rats furthermore serve as an allegory that points outside the novel to contemporaneous historical evildoers, namely those complicit in the Holocaust’s horrors.

Other animals appear throughout the novel. Tarrou’s neighbor relishes spitting on cats, and many characters’ comical descriptions bear animalistic references. For instance, Othon resembles an owl, his wife a mouse, and their children poodles. Gonzalez, a smuggler poised to help Rambert and whose countenance bears an equine resemblance, becomes designated by the synecdoche “horse-face.” Given the status of humanity as represented in the novel, the narrator’s parodic reduction of human beings to animal types communicates the declining value of human life during the epidemic. Ultimately, as the plague ravages Oran, its citizens are reduced to their most base instincts, which differ little from those of animals.