Larry March
Professor R.M Stambaugh
English 1102
24 February 2012
The embodiment of the absurd hero: “Existence precedes essence” The only thing we can’t not do is not choose.
The story of The Guest is about Daru, a lonely schoolteacher in Camus’ boyhood home of Algeria. Daru likes living in solitude, but he must learn to recognize that choices are unavoidable and that his choices matter. The story takes place in the middle of the nineteenth century when Algeria is still a land full of conflict between the oppressed Algerian people and their French colonial rulers. At the beginning of the story the French send the gendarme, Balducci to Daru with an Arab convicted of murder. Through Balducci the prisoner comes under the charge of
He particularly notices the beauty of the landscape the day he leaves the schoolhouse to send the Arab on his way. In this wide landscape of Algeria Camus found an appropriate setting to highlight Daru’s aloneness and draw attention to the cold emptiness of the background. For Camus Algeria was the land of the summer sky emptied of tenderness, beneath which all truths can be told and on which no deceitful divinity has traced the signs of hope or of redemption.
In the story he describes the scenery through the eyes of Daru, he give us the feeling of how loneliness it is and how deserted Daru is. This is the way it was: bare rock covered three quarters of the region. Towns sprang up, flourished, then disappeared; men came by, loved one another or fought bitterly, then died. No one in this desert, neither he nor his guest, mattered. Daru waits in his lonely schoolhouse on the snow-covered plateau, cut off from civilization by a blizzard. This barren land where survival is difficult is a “solitary expanse where nothing had any connection with man”. This theme of solitude provides the key to the importance of Daru and his choices. Daru likes the remoteness and isolation of the plateau, and at first he finds it difficult to accept the presence of another human being in the same sleeping quarters. Daru, who sleeps naked at night, feels vulnerable in the Arab’s company. He cannot sleep because he is thinking about