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I agree with kgrass's musings on the overlap of science and literature, and I think that with the rise of postmodernism and the questioning of objective truth, the two are becoming closer than ever before. Feminist critiques of science are increasingly revealing how mainstream science is just one story among many possible ones, and that we are really only beginning to understand the storytelling potential of science and how it shapes our lives. By taking science off the pedestal that it may once have occupied and examining it subjectively, it becomes more like literature. In turn, as we study literature and use it to understand more general truths or try to understand our lives, it becomes more like science.

Looking back on The Plague in light of these observations, I can read both of them as a critique of the line between science and literature. The Plague seems to imply that science is just one way of trying to understand a crisis, but that the stories we all tell (i.e., that all the characters in the story tell themselves) are just as important in understanding a time of crisis. Science is not The Story or the definitive way out, but just one way of trying to cope with the situation.