What one reviewer said about A Journal Of The Plague Year by Daniel Defoe:
Defoe has pulled off something brilliant here. Although he was only 5 years old in 1665 (the year of the title), in 1720 he set down a narrative full of rich details blending fact and imagination. The thoroughness of his descriptions and the constant realism come close to convincing you that these are first-hand observations: but these are *not* first hand observations; his narrator is a fiction, recalling events he saw as an adult.
The persuasiveness of Defoe's fiction comes from his specificity, and little comments suggesting the narrator has an additional life outside the Journal. He mentions not only the dead (and the increasing losses), but the quacks taking advantage of the gullible, the quarantining of infected houses, the marks on the doors, the efforts to escape from quarantined houses, the efforts of the mayor's offfice to limit the spread of infection, and the public pits where the bodies were thrown. And so on into the facets of everyday life. Through it all, his portrayal of the narrator also has a personal richness, a consistent first-person perspective; the conceit is reinforced by insertions such as "what I wrote of my private meditations I reserve for private use, and desire it may not be made public on any account whatever." The narrator is a product of Defoe's imagination, of course, and similarly, any private meditations such a narrator would have. But Defoe has cleverly made the narrator real.
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