Dramatic irony
Summary
The protagonist in Alfred Camus’ short story “L’hôte” (“The Guest”) is Daru, an Algerian-born French schoolteacher assigned to a remote Algerian schoolhouse, just before the start of the French-Algerian war. A gendarme named Balducci arrives at the schoolhouse accompanied with an Arab prisoner. 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 revolves around a dramatic irony, which culminates in its conclusion. Irony refers to the space between expectation and reality or what actually happens. The landscape of the desert where Daru is posted is desolate yet beautiful. He is isolated in this desert, yet it is here that Daru feels comfortable. 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. On the contrary, Baladucci is of the 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).
Camus paints the irony of Daru’s conviction that not making a choice about what to do with the captive Arab is the just thing to do. Howver, given that not making a choice is still a choice in itself, Daru is blind to the realities he faces in the Arab’s world. 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).
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 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.
