The novel's moral center and secret narrator. Rieux is defined by what he does rather than what he believes — he treats patients, organizes resistance, records facts. His philosophy is not articulated but enacted: decency as daily practice, resistance as habit rather than heroism. He suppresses his own suffering (his wife's illness, Tarrou's death) to maintain the chronicle's objectivity. This restraint is both his strength and his tragedy — he saves his capacity for feeling by refusing to feel, and the cost is visible only in the novel's final pages.