Summary
The article The Guest by Powell David is a literary review of the original short story by Alfred Camus entitled “L’hôte” (“The Guest”). The protagonist in the story is Daru, a young Algerian-born French schoolteacher assigned to a remote Algerian schoolhouse, just before the start of the French-Algerian war. Old Corsician gendarme Balducci arrives at the schoolhouse accompanied with an Arab prisoner accused of killing his cousin. Balducci informs Daru that he has to turn in the prisoner to the authorities in the city. Daru, an honorable man, is faced with a major moral dilemma: whether to do his duty of delivering the Arab prisoner to the police or allow him to escape on brotherhood and friendship grounds. Daru gives the prisoner a freedom of choice between captivity and freedom when they reach at a crossroads —one direction heading to police headquarters, while the other heading south to the nomads in the desert (Bronner 150). While Daru stands watching, the Arab chooses to go to the police headquarters. Daru returns to his schoolhouse with a heavy heart where he finds a frightening message left for him on his blackboard.
The story is full of dramatic, verbal and situational irony which begins with the title itself (meaning both ‘guest’ and ‘host’), culminating in its conclusion. Irony refers to the space between expectation and reality or what actually happens. It is highly ironic of Balducci to expect Daru to comply with his order considering Daru’s sympathetic position to the natives by virtue of being in exile there. At the same time, it is ironic that Daru is not respective of European justice on the one hand, but cannot overlook the criminal of the Arab prisoner on the other. Baladucci use verbal irony in his belief that Daru would be treated as a foreigner should anything happen: Bakaducci warns, “If there’s an uprising, no one is safe, we’re all in the same boat” (Bronner 132).
Situational irony presents itself in Daru’s conviction that not making a choice about what to do with the captive Arab is the just thing to do. The Arab faces an ironical situation where he either chooses to turn himself to his own people and face severe penalties, or go to the nomads and thus give up his identity through self-imposed exile. Though he gives the Arab enough food and money to sustain a couple of days in the desert, the Arab only option is to hand himself to “the administration and the police” (Bronner 139). It is also situational irony that Daru, who has delinked himself from society, becomes a model of the best sense of humanity for any society as he is both Everyman figure and Christ figure. He suffers himself and for the world in promoting sustenance, comfort, tolerance and understanding in society.
The final dramatic irony in the story presents itself when Daru’s intended good will and efforts to remain uninvolved in the local politics backfires on him. On returning to his classroom, Daru finds a threatening message illegibly written on his blackboard over the four rivers of France on the map he had sketched earlier. The warning reads: “You handed over our brother. You will pay for this” (Bronner 140). Daru looks at the sky, at the plateau, “and beyond, the invisible lands stretching all the way to the sea. In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone” (Bronner 144).
Daru is a man alone in this indifferent universe but takes a place in it. This situational irony at this point is Camus’ notion of absurdity: “When all the snow was melted, the sun would take over again and once more would burn the fields of stone. For days, still, the unchanging sky would shed its dry light on the solitary expanse where nothing had any connection with man” (Bronner 153). In this indifferent universe, Daru is truly an anomaly. Though Daru is in this part of the world, he is not of this place where “nothing had any connection with man; and yet, everywhere else he felt exiled” (Bronner 154).
Work cited:
Bronner, Stephen E. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
