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Overview of The Guest Essay

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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 …show more content…

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

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