The Guest

By: Albert Camus

[Pick the date]

Assignment by: Ayesha Farooq
Presented to: Ms. Maria Batool
The Guest Summary

The Guest follows the story of Daru, who is a schoolteacher in a remote plateau region. The area
has gone through a draught, but recently a blizzard has passed through, leaving everything
covered in snow. This has kept away Daru's pupils.
The narrative opens as Daru watches two men approach his schoolhouse. He watches them climb
the hill. One of the men, a gendarme named Balducci, is very familiar to Daru. He leads an Arab
prisoner who has been accused of murdering his cousin in a family squabble. Balducci has been
ordered to bring the Arab to Daru, and then return immediately to his post. Likewise, Daru has
orders to turn in the prisoner to police headquarters at a town approximately twenty kilometers
away. Daru refuses this task, considering it dishonorable. Balducci agrees with the schoolmaster,
but insists that in war men must be prepared to do many different jobs. The gendarme is insulted
by Daru's stubborn refusal, and leaves in anger.
Daru feeds the Arab and spends the night sleeping in the same room as the prisoner. During the
night the Arab gets up for water, and Daru mistakenly thinks he has escaped. The next day Daru
leads the Arab to a point on the plateau, and equips him with money and food supplies. He points
him in the direction of imprisonment, and then also points him in the direction away from police
headquarters, where he will find shelter with the native people. He leaves the Arab with the
choice, but when he looks back, he is upset to see the Arab ultimately chooses the direction
leading towards imprisonment. The story ends with Daru looking out the window of his
schoolhouse.

Character Analysis

Daru

He watches Balducci and the Arab approach the schoolhouse at the start of the narrative. The
schoolhouse is his home, although with the sudden snow none of his pupils attend anymore. He
spends the blizzard in his room, only leaving it to feed the chickens, get coal, or go to the shed.
The administration has given him wheat to distribute to his pupils. During the draught he felt like
a lord in his crude house because he was surrounded by complete and utter poverty. He is from
this region, which is described as cruel, but he feels exiled anywhere else. Daru argues against
delivering the Arab to Tinguit, and is plunged into a state of moral despair at the end of the
narrative when he realizes that the Arab has chosen certain imprisonment.

Balducci

Balducci is the man on the horse who leads the Arab up the hill to Daru. He holds the horse back
so not to hurt the Arab. Once within earshot he shouts a greeting to Daru. He is an old gendarme
and has known Daru for a long time. He looks upon Daru as a son, but is insulted by Daru's
refusal to turn in the Arab. It is Balducci who first speaks of a revolt, and speaks about the
obligations that men face during war. He clearly longs for a peaceful retirement, but is resigned
to his duties.

The Arab

The Arab is being led by Balducci. He walks while the gendarme rides a horse, and his hands are
tied. He keeps his head bowed, which fascinates Daru, and does not raise his head once during
the ascent. He wears a blue jellaba, sandals, and a cheche on his head. He is very timid and
fearful throughout the narrative, and even does not try to escape despite many opportunities. At
the end, he decides to walk towards imprisonment, and in this way symbolizes the absurdity and
despair of the human condition.

Critical Analysis

The original French title of this story, “L’Hôte,” means not only “the guest” but also “the host.”
There is no English word that conveys the double meaning of the French word. Distinctions are
leveled, done away with, in order to show a common humanity between Daru and the Arab; still
further opposed meanings suggested by the title (amity and hospitality on one hand, enmity and
hostility on the other) add to the ambiguity.

Major themes in this short story are; Morality, Solitude, Freedom, Limits of Human Knowledge,
The Absurd and most importantly existentialism and alienation.

Talking about ‘morality’, morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions
between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper. Daru faces a moral
dilemma when he is ordered to turn in the Arab. Like all the themes in the narrative, morality is
treated with ambiguity. Daru's course of action leads him into moral trouble: he does not know
whether the Arab deserves to be punished or let go, and he allows this uncertainty to overwhelm
him. He fails to choose at all, instead allowing the Arab to choose either freedom or trial. Daru's
ensuing moral despair should be understood in the light of Camus's philosophy. Camus believed
that once a decision was reached, it should be stuck to, and that the freedom to choose one's
action gives meaning to human life. Daru certainly believes that turning in the Arab was wrong,
yet he fails to simply release the prisoner. He fails to make a decision, and as a result he is left in
complete moral solitude. The author is deliberately ambiguous because the circumstances of
Daru and his Arab guest are. There is no absolute action that can completely satisfy either
character. Daru can neither accept European justice nor ignore the crime for which his guest is
guilty. The Arab can neither give himself up to his own people nor go to the nomads. To do the
former would be to invite severer penalties on him; to do the latter would be to surrender his
identity in a self-imposed exile.

Talking about ‘solitude’, Solitude is a state of seclusion or isolation, i.e., lack of contact with
people. It may stem from bad relationships, loss of loved ones, deliberate choice, infectious
disease, mental disorders, neurological disorders or circumstances of employment or situation.
There are two kinds of solitude in The Guest. Throughout the story Daru faces physical isolation
on his the remote plateau. This physical solitude is not a negative state, however; Daru has
accepted his living conditions and indeed feels at home within them. Though the landscape itself
is unfeeling and unforgiving, Daru makes himself comfortable within it.

At the end however, Daru occupies a state of moral solitude. His failure to act with regard to the
Arab's fate has left him disconnected from himself. He looks at the harsh landscape, once his
home, and sees only his failure to choose. This moral solitude is most clearly symbolized by the
mysterious writing on the blackboard. If he wrote it himself, it represents his despair and his
alienation from himself -- he has betrayed his own principles in allowing the Arab to choose
punishment. If someone else wrote it, it represents a clear threat. Daru, who failed to use
judgment, will now be judged by others who do not understand him. Thus his situation is one of
extreme isolation from human understanding. It is ironic that Daru, who has chosen to cut
himself off from society, is representative of the best sense of humanity that any society can
offer. He is both, Everyman and Christ figure, suffering as a citizen of the world and suffering
for the world, providing sustenance and comfort and promoting tolerance and understanding. A
measure of his tolerance is that he reserves ultimate judgments and generously sees more than
one side of any question. His charitable reasonableness does not suffice, though, to counter the
cruelties and unreasonableness in the Algerian situation.

Freedom lies at the core of The Guest, and is inherently connnected with the human right to
choose a course of action. Freedom gives life meaning, and Camus believed that through
independent action one finds value in life. The narrative represents this philosophy. Daru's
choice to live in the plateau region is a choice motivated out of what Camus would call an
understanding of the "absurd." Any human needs to belong to a place, and the cruel plateau
region embodies a type of home for him despite its desolate climate. Just so, Camus feels, we all
need to make a home for ourselves within an essentially uncaring universe. The way we make
this home is through individual choice.

However, the freedom to choose is also paradoxically an obligation. When we decide not to
choose we fall victim to the essential cruelty and ambiguity of the universe. Indeed, we cannot
decide not to choose we must choose in order to retain freedom. Daru attempts to pass along his
obligation to choose to the Arab. However, when the Arab decides to turn himself in, Daru
suffers for it. Daru should have made a decision, one way or the other, and stuck with it. Instead,
he finds himself in a state of desperate moral ambiguity.

Everyone in The Guest has limited knowledge of the happenings of the story. Balducci doesn't
know why the Arab killed his cousin, or why Daru must take the Arab to the police; he simply
has his orders and follows them. Daru doesn't know whether the Arab should be released or
punished, though he constantly tries to glean information about why the Arab committed murder
-- if he even did. Meanwhile, the Arab displays confusion when Daru asks him difficult
questions and when Daru explains his choice to either escape to the south or turn himself into the
police.

The reader, too, occupies a limited vantage point. We never learn whether the Arab deserves
punishment or freedom. We never learn who wrote the message on the blackboard at the end of
the story. Camus denies us crucial knowledge, thus putting us in a similar position to Daru -- or
to any individual who must make choices despite his or her limited perspective.
And indeed, we all must do so every day, though rarely in the dramatic fashion Camus sets up in
The Guest. Because human knowledge is always subjectively situated that is, it always happens
from a particular individual's point-of-view it's always going to be limited. If we let this fact
haunt us, the way that Daru does, we open ourselves up to moral despair. However, if we make
choices anyway and own our choices, we may avoid such despair. Daru becomes preoccupied
with the limitations of his knowledge and thus fails to choose opening the door to despair.

Finally, moving towards the theme of ‘absurd’ in the story; Camus envisions the universe as
silent and indifferent (his portrayal of the cruel plateau region fits this vision very neatly).
Despite this indifference, human beings must survive. They continue to build meaning and
pursue certainty, even though such aims are impossible. This combination of a godless, uncaring
world and human striving leads to a condition that Camus dubs "the absurd." He writes, "The
absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the
world."

Although it might sound pretty depressing to live in an inescapable state of "the absurd," Camus
feels that this is the only way we can exist. One must continue striving, choosing and pursuing
freedom, even though the universe does not care whether we live or die. Daru's ability to find
comfort and within the harsh plateau climate bodes well for his ability to sustain life in absurd
conditions; however, his failure to respond to the moral dilemma represented by the Arab
ultimately crushes him. In the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, one must act with an absurd
confidence. One must choose anyway. Daru fails to do so and thus fall into despair.

For Camus, however, the act of confrontation with absurdity, with the meaninglessness and the
contradictoriness of experiences in life, is the duty of the heroic type; it is perpetual, as is the
struggle of Sisyphus, the mythological figure who passes eternity pushing a huge rock up a
mountain only to have it fall again once he has arrived at the top with it. The confrontation is
undertaken by the conscious hero with the understanding that there can be for him no divine
hope to sustain him in his struggle. He knows that he is inevitably bound for extinction, but he
brings a dignity, grandness, to his task that sustains him and that lends to his existence the only
meaningfulness it can have. Daru is no conscious hero, certainly, but he is representative of the
noble person who confronts existence and, usually, ends by having to suffer, and sometimes die,
for it.
Theme of alienation and existentialism are also present in the story. Albert Camus was closely
linked to existentialism in the 1940’s, while he spent the war years in Paris; the French
Resistance brought him into the circle of Jean-Paul Sartre, which was one of the leaders in
existentialism. This movement is based on the analysis of human existence and the individuals
defining everything in their lives. ‘’Existentialism attempts to describe our desire to make
rational decisions despite living in an irrational universe.’’ Camus emphasized the
meaninglessness of existence and he believed that no choice is necessarily the right choice. In the
following analysis, we will notice the existentialist ideas represented in his best known and most
popular short story, ‘’The Guest’’.

Camus’ story the ‘’The Guest’’, is about choices. Daru lives in the schoolhouse away from
civilization which shows that he is isolated geographically and emotionally. One day, Balducci
the officer arrives with a prisoner and he forces Daru to take responsibility for him. The prisoner
must be brought to the police headquarters in Tinguit. Daru is surprised by the orders and tells
Balducci that this task should not be done by a school teacher. He does not want to be involved
with the political conflict, which is why the setting of the isolated schoolhouse is so symbolic.
The setting of the story is important since it is during the Algerian war and Balducci tells the
schoolteacher that he must follow the orders even if it is not his job, because during war times,
everybody must participate. Since they are expecting a civil war in Algeria, the police officers
must not be away during this time. Daru is disgusted by the demands and tells him that he will
not obey the orders given to him. By refusing to follow the orders, Daru is making choices that
most people would not usually take. People tend to obey authority and do what they are told.
He acts in good faith; because he is doing what he believes is right.

During the first night, Daru has difficulty sleeping since he is beside the prisoner. The Arab goes
out in the middle of the night and Daru is afraid that he might escape. The prisoner actually
comes back to the house, which demonstrates his choice of following what he has been told.
When Daru sees this, he realizes that the contact with the Arab prisoner is a turning point for him
because it makes him understand a lot about himself. Instead of treating the Arab like a prisoner,
Daru decides to be the host and treats the prisoner like a guest by taking care of him and offering
food and shelter. Camus, through Daru, questions the issue of whether justice and freedom, as
well as solitude and solidarity will ever be compatible in our society.
In this story, Daru examines man’s moral responsibilities and believes it is wrong to turn the
prisoner over to the authorities, yet he realizes that going against the orders might also cause him
troubles. So, he avoids making a decision by leaving the prisoner the responsibility for choosing
his own way; to turn himself in or to take the path of freedom. One way or another Daru will be
held responsible either by the French authorities or the Arabs. No matter what he chooses, there
will always be difficulties and acting in good fate will never save you, like existentialists believe.
At the end of the story, the message written on the blackboard “you handed over our brother.
You will pay for this.’’ (p. 192) demonstrates that he is still in trouble; no matter what he chose
and that in the end he is still alone.

The prisoner is free to choose his own fate: prison or freedom. The Arab could have chosen
freedom over imprisonment, but he turned himself in instead of escaping to the south, which
shows his decision to be sentenced for what he has done to his cousin.

In a nutshell, this story mainly deals with the existential crises that are, choosing between what is
rational and what is irrational. We witness, how Daru is stuck between making choices about
keeping the prisoner and/or handing him over to the police. Not only Daru but also the prisoner
is too, dealing with the existential crises. Towards the end we witness, how both of them chose,
what according to them, was rational. We, being humans, have a lot deal in existential crises
throughout our life. Sometimes, deciding between what is rational and what is irrational is not
always as easy. It is basically a war between ones’ conscious mind and conscience but at the end
of the day, we end up being rational or irrational and we are alone in our choices anyway.