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 ...
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‘‘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 yet another intermediate position, the plateau. The school itself is described as being on a ‘‘terrace,’’ evoking the picture of the plateau. The ideas of separation and intermediacy are tied together in this story and describe not only Daru’s physical setting but the situation of Daru himself. Camus’ depiction of the weather also helps to set the both the physical and mental mise en scene. At each description Daru is in between two climatic conditions. The light is dirty, the snow will be melted, the ceiling of clouds lifts, the light is increasing, and the weather is clearing. In Daru’s belief, the scene is linked to the past and the future. The suggestion of this moment of relaxing of tensions between two extreme types of weather again evokes the themes of separation and of intermediacy. During this transition the only violence alluded to relates to the men and not the landscape. The snow which hides the trail is described as a ‘‘dirty white layer’’ neither perfectly clean nor completely transformed by the desert. It is present but about to disappear. The snow changes the nature of the countryside; for example: ‘‘His steps were muffled by the snow. . . . A big stone could be heard rolling softly.’’ The snow mutes the sharp sound of boots on rocky ground as it attenuates the harshness of the stone which, because of it, rolls ‘‘softly.’’ For the moment, the snow neutralizes the countryside’s mineral hardness, a fundamental element of the universe of the desert. The descriptions of the school’s location, of the weather and of the snow all point out the moral situation of the protagonist. An unwilling guardian of the Arab prisoner, Daru is caught between two loyalties. He must decide between solidarity with the threatened European community, or with the broader human fraternity which motivates him to free the Arab. The themes of neutrality and of separation inherent in the description of the setting, and reinforced by the evocation of ambivalent weather, reflect the neutrality and isolation of a mind which has not yet made a decision. The snow softens the hardness of the countryside; the violence of the blizzard is now at an end, and the sun’s has not yet begun again. Everything is undecided Attached to the desert, Daru was not able to see his situation clearly. The descriptions of the school’s location, of the weather and of the snow have a symbolic value. They show that, as long as the Arab remained with him, the schoolmaster enjoyed a certain freedom of action. But that indecision could not continue. A choice was necessary: Daru had to join with either his threatened community or with a broader and more wretched humanity, represented by the Arab. He refuses to choose, daydreams about the countryside that he loves, and does nothing. Finally, the next morning, he rejects both the European community and the Arab. The similarity between his guest and the countryside plays a prophetic role; because of his refusal to join with the Arab, Daru loses the countryside. Even the gesture which accompanies the decision, the throwing of the stone, indicates that he has set in motion a mechanism which, in 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.
