Wanderer in the Plague Year

Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" is an early work of historical fiction written in 1722. The text presents the readers with the horrors of the plague that took hold of London during 1665. The story being set at a time in which Defoe himself was quite young, being roughly 5 years old, gives the text an interesting element, because although Defoe was not old enough to remember the details surrounding the events at the height of the plague in London that he writes of, he would have some memory of the trauma and the outcomes of the plague. These elements of memory are incorporated and contrasted by his narrator in his story.

Bill of Mortality from 1665

The narrator of the text does not speak, he merely observes and describes the experience of being in London in 1665. The narrator pays particular attention to the facts of the plague's impact: the death tolls are reported regularly throughout the text, the measures taken by the city and its inhabitants to manage the spread of the plague, and thorough descriptions of the different areas in which the narrator wanders.

Because of the intense attention to details by the narrator, Defoe creates a character who is void of characteristics, which allows the reader to experience the scale and the sense of being witness to the events themselves by embodying the narrator and seeing what he sees. B giving the narrator little in terms of personality, Defoe creates a more universal experience than if he were to have had given his narrator a more specific trauma.

This is in a paradoxical parallel with Defoe's own experience, having heard of the cultural trauma of the plague and having some recollection of the sensation of the events, but not having experienced it at a time when he would have remembered all of these details expressed by the narrator. By focusing on the details, the narrator conveys the scale and the communal sense of fear and despair felt among the Londoners of the time, while also keeping a distance from it.