The Guest, Albert Camus | Eberhard Griem (essay date winter 1993)
Eberhard Griem (essay date winter 1993)
SOURCE: Griem, Eberhard. “Albert Camus's ‘The Guest’: A New Look at the Prisoner.” Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 1 (winter 1993): 95-8.
[In the following essay, Griem addresses the existentialist dilemma faced by both Daru and the Arab prisoner in “The Guest.”]
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 dim-witted character. In an influential early reading, Laurence Perrine helped establish this view, claiming that “his incomprehension … is emphasized” (“Camus' ‘The Guest’” 57). His comments in the Instructor's Manual accompanying his widely used textbook Story and Structure reinforce the view: “From the beginning the Arab is pictured as passive, uncomprehending, a little stupid” (24). Nor does...
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