The Obscure Hero

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, who struggles for years to write the first sentence of a novel he will never finish. If it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a hero, the narrator says, he commends this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal.

It would have been easy to make the hero brilliant. Camus refuses. When the plague comes, Grand does not make speeches or take charge. He simply keeps the records, night after night, the unglamorous bookkeeping of the sanitary squads, because it needs doing and he is there to do it. That is all. A little goodness of heart, 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 actually hold a community together in its worst hours are almost never the famous ones. They are the clerks and nurses and neighbors who show up and do the plain next thing without being asked or thanked. History remembers the loud. Camus asks us to honor the obscure, the ones subject to history rather than the ones who make it.

It matters because you are far more likely to be a Grand than a hero of the usual kind, and so is nearly everyone you love.

Today, notice one obscure hero near you, the person quietly keeping something running, and say so out loud. Better yet, be one. Do the small faithful task in front of you as if it were heroic. It is.