. The plague is no longer an irritant or even a coming danger. It is a fact and it has firmly embedded itself around Oran’s perimeter. The suburbs have continually felt its growth and have become part of “a tightening belt of death that draws together toward the center of the city”(Knapp142). Moreover, the disease is no longer merely “plague.” It begins to have a diversity and an adaptability belonging to the philosophy of adapting and surviving. The plague has separated Oran from the outside and many of the Oranians from their loved ones, but it has begun to unite men of different temperaments and philosophies and to create a feeling of common humanity among them.In this third section, no isolated actions are described. The individual revolt of the first week of the plague is replaced with a vast despondency in which nothing is left “but a series of present moments.” Riley states that “In this third part of the novel the citizens of Oran are crushed both physically and psychologically; their bodies die, and so do their minds and hearts; they are ready to surrender, and their hearts are emptied of love”(Riley 93). Rhein agrees when he says “Whereas in the early days of the plague the people of Oran had been struck by the host of small details that had ment so much to them personally and had made their lives unique, they now took an interest only in what interested everyone else; they had only general ideas, and even their tenderest affections now seemed abstract, items of the common stock”(Rhein 52). Part three is a short, intense chronicle of the crisis weeks in Oran, “the time when two natural powers-the plague’s rising fever and the midsummer sun-incinerate the city’s prisoners. No longer is there active revolt. The panic-generated energy of part two is gone”(Knapp 156). Depression has struck the population. Oranians now have the t...
