Albert Camus The Guest Analysis

Decent Essays
If you never make a choice and instead hid your head in the sand, are you actually alive or are you no better than dead? This is a question Albert Camus might have found himself asking of his hero Daru when he was writing “The Guest.” In Camus’s story we find a reluctant Daru, forced into a situation not of his making, placing him in a dilemma he would no doubt do anything to be removed from. Yet it is in the absurd circumstances like the decision to free the prisoner or not that Camus gets the chance to explore how people react and ultimately resolve those conflicts. In some cases, people like Daru will leave that choice to another for fear of making the wrong choice, while others like the prisoner decides to do the right thing by accepting his fate and choosing the tough road. By choosing no path, Daru’s lack of choice leads him to the forgone conclusion of his unavoidable downfall, something Camus expresses by placing him in a crisis of his own making. …show more content…
It is not until Camus introduces two new characters, the older gendarme Balducci and his prisoner the Arab, does the reader see how Daru is content to live a small life, locked away in his school house alone where the problems one faces when confronted with choice never invade a person’s solitude. Camus draws a unique picture of Daru’s solitude by explaining the terrain as desolate and forbidding but something the character of Daru is comfortable with, to the point of saying that while his life really didn’t matter in this desert, there was no where outside of the desert he could really live (Camus, 1957, pp. 754). The desert was his isolation and home. Yet problems found a way to ultimately invade his

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