The Guest, Albert Camus | Nathan Cervo (essay date spring 1990)
Nathan Cervo (essay date spring 1990)
SOURCE: Cervo, Nathan. “Camus's ‘L'Hôte’.” The Explicator 48, no. 3 (spring 1990): 222-24.
[In the following essay, Cervo asserts that Camus utilizes elements of Roman Catholic, Marxist, and Gnostic dialectic in “The Guest.”]
In Albert Camus's short story “L'hôte” (which is generally translated as “The Guest” in English, although hôte simultaneously means host), the “old gendarme” Balducci (baal, duce: Jehovah) comes from El Ameur (a pun on Semitic el, that is, god, and Latin amor, meaning love) leading a roped, Christlike Arab up the hill to the secular-humanist teacher Daru's “schoolhouse.” The Arab, it turns out, has killed his “cousin” with a “sheephook.” In keeping with Camus's prevailing dialectic, involving Roman Catholicism, Marxism, and Gnosticism, the Arab may be viewed as a kind of Bonus Pastor...
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