While literature may originate either in a state of isolation or social immersion alone, literary artists have long moved back and forth along a continuum between the two to produce their works. Jack London's 1912 novel The Scarlet Plague is significant for the ways in which it sheds light on the relationship between quarantine, social immersion, and literary composition through its interplay of memory, inversion, and narrative authority. The novel achieves this primarily by juxtaposing, distancing, and bridging the distance between complementary opposites, such as remembering and forgetting, civilized and wild, and storyteller and audience. Jack London's The Scarlet Plague stands as an important work in the field of pandemic literature, informing and reframing those that have preceded it, while continuing to influence and inspire those that follow. In doing so, it alerts readers and practitioners of literary art to the dangers, mysteries and wonders of quarantine.