Reading the Past

Wrt to "survivors" thing I wonder whether my attitude to the expectation that the pov character will survive is coloured by the fact that the first book I read (that I can recall) in which plague was a theme was The Children of Green Knowe over the course of which the pov character gradually comes to realise that his invisible friends, the four children from the 17th century portrait over the mantelpiece, are children precisely because they died in the plague, and are therefore captured in time at that moment. The big reveal of Charlotte Sometimes is to similar effect. I wonder if there's a difference between children/YA treatment of plague as a theme, perhaps because plague means something different as a theme (which reminds me, I need to re-read Camus, because I've forgotten who dies there).