The Father of the Plague-Stricken (Ojciec zadżumionych; also rendered as The Father of the Plague-Stricken at El Arish) is a narrative poem by Juliusz Słowacki. It is a single, concentrated work rather than a novel or a collection of episodes. Its subject is the destruction of one family by plague in the Egyptian town and quarantine station of El Arish.
The poem opens by establishing the plague-stricken setting and the figure of an Arab father who has been marked by catastrophic loss. His testimony forms the core of the work: he recalls his wife and children, the onset of the plague among them, and the way the disease takes the family one by one. The father remains healthy while the others sicken; he watches their symptoms, hears their last words, nurses them as far as the quarantine allows, and is left to deal with their deaths and burials. The poem’s force lies in the accumulation of these intimate deaths and in the father’s helplessness as his household is emptied.
The quarantine setting intensifies the isolation: the family is cut off from ordinary human society, and the father’s care cannot stop the pestilence. By the end he is the sole survivor, and his monologue becomes a lament for his wife and children and a meditation on the burden of remaining alive after them. The work keeps its focus on one man’s grief, on fatherhood, and on the moral shock of a loving parent outliving his whole family; it does not expand into a chronicle of the epidemic or a political narrative. Its manner is dramatic and monologue-driven, with the father’s voice—by turns recollected, anguished, and resigned—carrying the poem’s action and meaning.
Themes and ideas.
At its center is a theodicy without resolution: the father’s account presses the question of why innocent children suffer and why he is spared, but the poem offers no tidy Providence. Religious submission and paternal protest coexist; the father’s faith does not cancel his grief, and his grief does not harden into open blasphemy. The result is a dramatic tension between consolation and its failure.
The plague is rendered as both domestic and metaphysical: it enters through bodies, symptoms, and care, yet it also exposes the arbitrariness of death. The poem refuses to turn plague into a simple allegory; its horror lies in the ordinary intimacy of nursing and watching. The father’s survival becomes a form of guilt and exile—he is not rewarded but left as a living memorial.
Quarantine adds a moral layer: the disease separates the family from normal communal mourning, so the father must bury and remember under conditions that deny ritual consolation. His monologue therefore functions as a substitute burial and a testimony. Telling the story is itself an ethical act: it preserves the dead and imposes witness on the listener.
The fatherhood theme is sharpened by role-loss: his identity as protector and head of household is undone by his inability to save anyone. The poem studies grief as labor—nursing, burial, remembrance—rather than as passive emotion. Its significance lies in this austere, unsentimental focus on one man’s endurance and on the limits of explanation before extreme suffering; it is a Romantic work less interested in spectacle than in the ethical pressure of attending to another’s catastrophe.
