Civic duty and solidarity are recurring themes teachers turn to when assigning essays on "The Plague," given how directly the novel dramatizes ordinary citizens choosing to help one another during a prolonged crisis. The risk with these popular themes, much like isolation, is that students can produce essays that identify the theme accurately without developing a genuinely arguable claim about how the novel treats it. Strong prompts on this topic need to push students toward a specific, contestable position rather than allowing them to simply confirm that the novel values solidarity, which almost any reader would already agree with.

One effective way to sharpen this theme is asking students to evaluate the limits or costs of solidarity as the novel presents them, rather than only its value, since Camus does not portray collective duty as uncomplicated or costless. Rambert's initial resistance to joining the collective effort, prioritizing his personal happiness over civic duty for much of the novel, offers rich material for an essay that takes seriously the counterargument against solidarity before ultimately addressing how the novel resolves that tension. A prompt asking students to defend or challenge whether the novel is fair to Rambert's initial position produces far more interesting writing than a prompt simply asking students to explain why solidarity matters.

Another productive angle involves asking students to examine whether the novel's vision of solidarity is genuinely inclusive or whether it has limits worth interrogating, since the volunteer sanitary squads Tarrou organizes are notably voluntary rather than universal, and the novel does not claim every citizen of Oran participates equally in this collective response. An essay exploring who does and does not join the collective effort, and what the novel suggests about why, pushes students toward a more nuanced reading than a simple celebration of solidarity as a uniform, universally embraced value across the entire city.

Prompt Design That Avoids the Obvious Answer

When designing prompts about civic duty and solidarity, it helps to explicitly build a counterargument or complication into the prompt language itself, rather than leaving students to discover the theme's complexity on their own. A prompt phrased as "the novel suggests solidarity requires personal sacrifice; evaluate whether this sacrifice is presented as ultimately worthwhile or as a genuine loss the novel does not fully resolve" signals to students from the outset that a simple, uncomplicated answer will not fully satisfy the assignment's demands. This kind of prompt design does real work in raising the baseline quality of student thinking before drafting even begins.

• Evaluate the costs Rambert weighs before choosing to stay, rather than only celebrating his eventual decision
• Examine who joins Tarrou's volunteer squads and who does not, and what this suggests about the novel's realism
• Consider whether Rieux's professional duty differs meaningfully from Tarrou's more voluntary form of civic commitment
• Analyze whether the novel presents solidarity as a genuine choice or as something closer to inevitable necessity
• Assess whether the novel's ending complicates or reinforces its earlier vision of collective duty and solidarity

Grading Essays That Genuinely Grapple With Complexity

When students take on a more complicated version of this theme, grading criteria need to reward genuine grappling with tension rather than penalizing an essay for not reaching a fully resolved, tidy conclusion. A rubric line that explicitly credits students for acknowledging costs or limits to solidarity, even if their final position still ultimately affirms its value, signals that complexity itself is being rewarded rather than treated as a liability. This matters because some students, worried that acknowledging a counterargument will weaken their essay, avoid engaging with genuine complexity unless the rubric explicitly tells them it is valued.

Feedback on these essays should specifically name moments where a student successfully grappled with tension versus moments where they glossed over a genuine complication too quickly. A comment noting, "you acknowledge that Rambert initially resists collective duty, but the paragraph moves past this too fast, what does his resistance suggest about the limits of solidarity as an ideal" pushes a student to develop the harder, more interesting version of their argument rather than settling for a surface-level treatment of a genuinely rich theme.

Connecting the Theme to Broader Civic Discussions

Because civic duty and solidarity are themes with obvious relevance beyond the specific historical and literary context of the novel, some teachers choose to extend the essay assignment with a brief reflective component asking students to connect the novel's treatment of these ideas to a contemporary example of collective action or civic responsibility. This kind of extension can deepen engagement, though it should remain clearly secondary to the primary literary analysis, with any contemporary connection serving to illuminate the text rather than replacing close textual analysis with general commentary on current events.

Teachers using this kind of extension should be explicit in the rubric about how much weight the contemporary connection carries relative to the core literary analysis, since students sometimes overcorrect and let the real-world discussion dominate an essay that is primarily meant to demonstrate literary interpretation skills. Keeping this component brief, perhaps limited to a single concluding paragraph, and clearly subordinate to the main textual argument, preserves the assignment's core purpose while still giving students a meaningful opportunity to connect Camus' ideas to their own understanding of civic life.