The Guest

As a short story, “The Guest” is structurally aligned with Aristotle’s conception of theatrical drama. Composed around 330 BCE, the philosopher’s renowned Poetics spells out that dramatic works must be presented through a tripartite structure comprising a beginning, a middle, and an end—or, as the segments have become known in narrative fiction, a setup, a confrontation, and a resolution. Also akin to the Aristotelian model is Camus’s adherence to the three unities: those of time, of place, and of action. Indeed, “The Guest” takes place over the course of a 24-hour period in the same desolate expanse of Algerian landscape, and its action consists of only one storyline.

Camus’s drama pivots around a choice that evolves into a turning point in Daru’s life. While the specifically remote Algerian landscape—whose vicissitudes the author details at great length such that, viewed alongside the area’s climate, it becomes an antagonist in the tale—is significant in the context of a story unfurling at the onset of the 1950s Algerian War, the fact that Daru inhabits an unnamed area, coupled with the lack of specificity in the characters’ names—the protagonist and antagonist are presented only by their surnames and the prisoner by none at all—suggest that the conflicts the men face are universal.

Still, the particular dynamics of the characters’ situations in “The Guest” cannot be overlooked or extracted from their historico-political conditions. Daru is a pied-noir—a French national born in French colonial Algeria. As such, he is in a complex bind vis-à-vis Balducci, the Corsican-born gendarme who obeys orders to the letter and expects that those he gives be correspondingly fulfilled. The detail that Balducci is Corsican cannot escape notice; originally ruled by the city-state of Genoa, Corsica was handed over to the French in the 18th century as repayment for a loan. Today a French collectivity, the Mediterranean island retains cultural and linguistic ties with Italy, as evinced in the gendarme’s Italianate family name. That Balducci’s ancestors derive from Italy rather than France does not for a moment cause him to doubt his allegiance to French rule, however. Even when he confesses that he feels ashamed while physically restricting prisoners, he nevertheless maintains a clear us-versus-them mentality when he declares: “But you can’t let them have their way” (69). Balducci unflinchingly sides with the French colonial government.

Daru, on the other hand, while French by citizenship, also sees himself as a native Algerian, having been born on Algerian soil—as evinced in the thought that “Everywhere else, he felt exiled” (66). The term “pied noir,” literally meaning “black-foot,” denotes a French person born in an African colony and who therefore passes as white except for their metaphorically black feet, synecdochally referring to their feeling connected to Africa by virtue of having spent most or all of their life walking on African soil. Caught between two loyalties and resolute in his philosophical upholding of free will and self-determination, Daru does not exactly denounce his country’s colonial rule, but he feels compelled to resist complying with orders that contradict his own moral and philosophical beliefs. Ultimately, he’d prefer to remain neutral and allow all parties to choose for themselves.

The Arab, a nameless embodiment of his fellow countrymen, has been dominated by the French for so long—as have his ancestors for many a generation—that he goes with the flow; he doesn’t appear to be particularly anti-French, at least not to the point that he articulates or acts on such a sentiment. The crime he’s accused of having committed is not only against a fellow Algerian, but against a family member. When Balducci attempts to motivate Daru to deliver the prisoner to Tinguit, he explains the urgency of the task, mentioning that “His village was beginning to stir; they wanted to take him back” (67-68), meaning that, with the Arab’s people moving to judge him under their own law, he must immediately be handed over to French authorities, who will try him under the de jure law of the land: French law. The complication, however, lies in the colonial context: Should the Arab—whose status in his own land is highlighted by the reality that he doesn’t even speak French, the language of the “haves”—be forced to submit to French law? While Daru indisputably abhors the man’s purported crime, he somehow senses that the prisoner deserves the opportunity to decide his own fate. Yet, when the schoolmaster affords him this space of self-determination, the Arab chooses to trudge toward the French, whose power, since their having seized the country in 1830, is all he’s ever known.

A great deal of Daru’s angst in deciding the best course of action regarding the prisoner foisted on him comes as a result of his limited knowledge of the prisoner’s situation. The Arab, too, is a victim of partial knowledge due to his inability to understand and speak French. By use of shifts in narrative, Camus creates a similar effect for the reader. The narrative alternates between omniscient and limited third-person points of view to express the characters’ thoughts, which, in the case of Balducci and the Arab, are largely undisclosed. Daru’s inner musings, on the other hand, gain expression through free indirect discourse, a narrative technique through which inner monologues—typically recounted in the first-person point of view—find expression through third-person narrative. By interweaving these various discursive modes, Camus opens the story’s narrative space to the ambiguities that culminate in the tragic hero Daru’s plummet into existential despair.

Both victims of limited awareness, Daru and the Arab are both qualified as “obstinate” on the same page, and both suffer from the alienation of being strangers in a strange land, as captured in the ambiguity presented in the French title “L’Hôte,” which can mean both “host” and “guest” (and which, in considering their parallel predicaments, creates confusion in determining which man plays which role). Both make ostensibly poor decisions based on their lack of contextual knowledge, and both face consequences uncertain to them and the reader. Ultimately, as the gendarme notes, “[…] you can never be sure” (68)—hence, the existential human condition.