About This Story

Last night I was reading The Plague, a novel published in 1947 by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, when I came across a passage that had a strange resonance:



To some, these events will seem quite natural; to others, all but incredible. But, obviously, a narrator cannot take account of these differences of outlook. His business is only to say: "This is what happened," when he knows that it actually did happen, that it closely affected the life of a whole populace, and that there are thousands of eyewitnesses who can appraise in their hearts the truth of what he writes.



In any case the narrator (whose identity will be made known in due course) would have little claim to…