The Guest | Albert Camus’s ‘The Guest’: A New Look at the Prisoner

In the following excerpt, Griem examines the Arab’s character in Camus’s ‘‘The Guest,’’ and contends that he is acting in accordance with his own cultural norms and codes.

Interpretations of Albert Camus’s short story ‘‘The Guest’’ so far have had a tendency to make rather little of the prisoner, typically treating him as a primitive, brutalized, somewhat dull or even dimwitted character. In an influential early reading, Laurence Perrine helped establish this view, claiming that ‘‘his...

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