Overview of The Guest
The story takes place in the North African desert as revolutionary
violence is about to erupt. The Guest has three characters: Daru the
schoolmaster, Balducci the policeman, and the Arab. The plot of The
Guest has the policeman handing over his Arab prisoner to Daru and
instructing Daru to take the prisoner to to a jail in a neighboring
village. Disgusted with the task, Daru brings the Arab to a crossroads
and virtually sets him free, giving him money, food and shows him the
two paths in front of him. One leads to the jail and the village, the
other a means of escape. The Arab misunderstands and walks alone to
the jail, letting his compatriots plot vengeance on the man who took
him away. The role of nature and of setting in The Guest is important
and elemental to the story.
While the other characters seem to deal with precise setting in the
story, Daru seems to perceive the country in which he lives. Because
of these two ways of describing the story, the creation of a décor
gives more levels of meaning to the story.
The word ''plateau'' appears numerous times in this The Gueat. A
plateau, while flat, is raised like a mountain, but it is neither one
nor the other; it is an area in between. Daru is on the ''high
plateau'' of the Sahara. Throughout the story Camus underscores the
position of the schoolmaster relative to the plateau, ''had not yet
tackled the abrupt rise,'' ''tackled the rise,'' ''were now halfway up
the slope.'' His house (the school) while located on a ''hill,'' is
not on the pinnacle, but on the ''hillside.'' Daru finds himself in an
in-between position on the hill which separates him from...
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... the end, exiles him from the
country he loves.
The structure of the short story increases the value of the motif of
inhumanity inherent in the presentation of the decor. Joy emanates
from nature when Daru is joyful, but it also emanates from it when he
is profoundly unhappy, overwhelmed by solitude. Daru has gambled on
nature instead of on men. He has lost the help which human solidarity
offers. The feeling of perfect union with the desert, a countryside
after his own heart, has proven to be an illusion. From a certain
point of view, this short story, published in 1957, states in esthetic
terms one of the essential ideas concerning Camus's vision of nature,
an idea which he formulated as early as 1937 in The Wrong Side and the
Right Side: nature, an independent entity, does not lend itself to the
schemes of man.
town they were heading to, he must come back to the pond and hide in
is searching for him and that he is going to have to encounter him at
sixties, his opinion was valued highly. This book gives an overview of how his opinion
David C. Snyder Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 47, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1986), pp. 197-213
in context of the period that Marx was writing in; at the end of the
Msimangu takes him to Ezenzeleni, where he is spiritually uplifted. & nbsp;
shows himself to two guards, Barnardo and Francisco, at first. The guards decide to bring
looming over him, he runs into the streets, eventually wandering in remorse. Victor runs into
body of ideas known as Marxism. In his youth he was deeply affected by the
In Kenneth Waltz’s book called Man, the State and War he attempted to show how realist pr...
who promises to show them where the path behind their house leads. It is with
...eath,” come down to pick up the wheat that has fallen on the ground. Lastly, many believe the abrupt ending to the middle of the three paths could refer to the premeditated ending of his life.
evidence for his Ideas. Such as in class discussions we stated answers to both sides of the
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1992), pp. 647-668
The narrator must choose between two 'fair'; roads, of which he cannot see the endpoints. Wandering between the two, he finally decides to take the road 'less traveled by.'; Yet, like most people, he later sighs with regret thinking of what he might have