He never wonders if people will consider him a hero—he never even considers himself to be a hero. He narrates his own story, but does so anonymously, to stress the fact that he is not bragging. He recruits a team to help him, rather than try to take on the whole plague himself—a foolish act which could obviously end only in failure. Without this modesty, Rieux could not have gathered a team, and could not have been so effective in fighting the plague.
Camus also demonstrates the existentialist qualities he perceives in the world around him by emphasizing the circular nature of the events in the novel. At the outset, he establishes Oran as an average town, with nothing at all extraordinary. He explains, “all that was to be conveyed was the banality of the town’s appearance and of life in it” (5). He then describes the gradual devolutionary spiral the town enters into, step by step. First, diseased rats die in the streets and cause general disquiet. As the plague spreads to people, “[t]he local press, so lavish of news about the rats, now had nothing to say. For rats died in the street; men in their homes. And the newspapers are concerned only with the street” (35). But soon, the weekly death rate becomes too high for people to ignore. As one family after another is escorted off to the quarantine and people die by the hundreds, the town erupts into anarchy. People are routinely shot on the streets and bodies are burned, “authorities… declare martial law and enforce the regulations deriving from it. Two looters were shot” (171). As the plague ends, however, the town gradually returns to normal. The narrator finishes his explanation of those whose lives were ruined by the plague by asking, “[b]ut who gave a thought to these lonely mourners?” (296). One of Rieux’s patients responds to the news that there is going to be a monument erected for the victims of the plague by saying, “I could have sworn it! And there’ll be speeches… I can almost hear them saying: ‘Our dear departed…’ And then they they’ll (sic) go off and have a good snack” (307). By emphasizing that the town is not changed by the epidemic, Camus shows the futility of Rieux’s efforts. Despite all the work Rieux dedicates to plague victims, he is not recognized as a hero, nor does the world even work particularly hard to remember the plague he fought so hard against.
	Camus intends for his novel to be an allegory for the Holocaust. His novel captures the collapse of society and devolution encouraged by the Nazis. It brings to mind a time in which life is cheap and society is pervaded by a general, formless terror—a terror of some unspeakably wicked force, which has the power to strike and kill anyone at any instant. There is a general sense that no one is safe. 