Is today’s section the first time in the book where “the plague” is used literally as a metaphor for larger societal ills? Tarrou starts his monologue, telling Rieux about his background and his relationship to his prosecutor father; how Tarrou resisted the condemnation to death of an accused man, then the death penalty in general — “my business was the hole in the chest” — all of this perpetrated by “plague sufferers” who, as I read it, seem to be each of us? I wonder if there is a way to exist, in this view, without being a plague sufferer? As we near the end of the book, the larger allegorical vision is beginning to come more clear…

FOR TOMORROW: Next 7 pages, to, in dialogue, “‘We must go back,'” in section 7 of  Part IV.