ask of withstanding the fever and the summer heat. There are mass burials of all that the plague has struck. Plague makes direct kills on some citizens; but on others it is more devious. Spritzen suggests that “The latter must battle on several fronts: fear, panic, and a feeling of exile and separation drain love from the heart; the senses are physically assaulted; the mind suffers major losses of hope and logic”(Spritzen 286). Even imagination fails finally to recall separated loved ones, just as a memory eventually succumbs. There is a trance-like adaptation to the plague. Horror reaches a point that fails to horrify any longer; it becomes a kind of monotonous norm, a habit. The Oranians live for the present, but are so sad and spiritless that they cannot inject their living with meaning. The changes within the people and within the city are important elements in this section. The plague, for example, is no longer concentrated in the outer districts. Suddenly it strikes the center of Oran, at its heart. Rhein comments that “We see Irony when we realize that plague initially isolated Oran from the outside world. Then, once inside the city, after it had given the town if not a responsible solidarity, at least a united sense of common trouble, it viciously attacked not individuals, but groups and caused members to be individual quarantined isolation”(Rhein 76). We see many more burials and then the worst is over. When the city can withstand no more, the plague begins to level off.The deadening immobility described in part three lies in violent contrast to the vibrant descriptions of individual actions that make part four the most moving and significant section of the book. Riley comments that “In part four the Oranians learn how to fight; they learn that their resistance must be organized; they learn that only by fighting beside and for one another do they have any hope of surviving themselves...
