ABSTRACT
“It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” 142 With this quotation from Defoe, which Camus sets as a motto for The Plague, 143 he makes it clear that he intends us to read it as a parable, a conte philosophique. Yet at the same time the book can be read as a straightforward story, as the factual account of an imaginary outbreak of plague supposed to have afflicted the town of Oran sometime in the 1940s. It is not only possible, it is perhaps inescapable to read it thus. And this is, I suggest, how it should be read. This is how I have composed it.
