Defoe presents his novel as a genuine book of memoirs, a detailed and intimate if sometimes rambling and digressive account of one man’s experience living in London throughout the ‘visitation’ that swept away an estimated 100,000 people - a fifth of the population of the city. One of the questions that Burgess grapples with is the relationship the Journal has with historical accuracy. His introduction is still available in the current Penguin Classics edition, and it remains a lively and thoughtful preparation for Defoe’s haunting description of the outbreak of plague that ravaged London in 1665. That’s a lot of work done by two little lines Camus must have known what he was doing.One of Anthony Burgess’s first commissions from Penguin Books was to write an introduction to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1966 as part of the Penguin English Library. The epigraph reflects that very predicament. Huh? What we’re saying is, The Plague makes a big deal out of language being inadequate, and also about truth being subject to debate.

The epigraph does something that we run into over and over throughout the course of The Plague: it makes a statement, only to call that statement into question immediately by qualifying it subjectively. The epigraph also says this representation is 'reasonable.' Is it reasonable? Well…that depends. This literal imprisonment represents the imprisonment we all endure if we muck about the world without the proper level of consciousness. In this case, the citizens of Oran being trapped in their plague-ridden town is one form of imprisonment. One type of imprisonment is being used to represent another type of imprisonment. And its discussion of representation immediately tips us off that, sniff sniff, we can smell an allegory headed our way. It comes from the preface to Volume III of Robinson Crusoe, also written by Defoe. Actually, this quote doesn’t come from A Journal of the Plague Year.

But more than homage to another writer with similar tastes for subject matter, this epigraph, like all good epigraphs, gives us a hint about how to read this novel. Much like the narrator of The Plague, the storyteller of A Journal of the Plague Year doesn’t reveal his identity until the very end, and even then only with his initials. It’s likely that Camus used this as a reference – or, you know, as some comforting bedtime reading. '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.' –Daniel Defoe Who is this man Defoe? What is this about? Well, first of all, Daniel Defoe wrote fictional book in 1722 called A Journal of the Plague Year about, yes, that’s right, a plague that ravages London the 17th century.

A journal of the plague