The Obscure Hero
“If it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a 'hero,' the narrator commends to his readers, with, to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE PLAGUE
Still in the plague year, Camus pauses to answer a question the whole book has been circling. If this story needs a hero, who is it? Not the doctor, not the philosopher, not anyone grand. He chooses a man named Grand, which is Camus’s small joke, a stooped municipal clerk who has never been promoted and who struggles for years over the first sentence of a novel he will never finish.
It would have been easy to make the hero brilliant. Camus refuses. When the plague comes, Grand makes no speeches and takes charge of nothing. He keeps the records, night after night, the unglamorous bookkeeping of the sanitary squads, because it needs doing. A stubborn faithfulness to a small task, and Camus says deliberately that this is what a hero looks like.
This is solidarity’s quiet politics. The people who hold a community together in its worst hours are almost never the famous ones. They are the clerks and nurses and neighbors who do the plain next thing without being asked or thanked. History remembers the loud. Camus asks us to honor the obscure.
It matters because you are far likelier to be a Grand than a hero of the usual kind, and so is nearly everyone you love.
There is an obscure hero within fifty feet of you, quietly keeping something running. Say so out loud. Better still, be one. Do the small faithful task in front of you as though it were heroic.
