Albert Camus The Guest: Isolation of Man - Essay Example

Although he had posted for a job at the foot hills of the Atlas Mountains, where the climate was much ideal, he is made to live in the school building on the lonely plateau. The writer has depicted this experience as, “It was this silence that had seemed painful to him during the first days here, after the war. He had requested a post in the little town at the base of the foothills separating the upper plateaus from the desert. There, rocky walls, green and black to the north, pink and lavender to the south, marked the frontier of eternal summer.

He had been named to a post farther north, on the plateau itself. In the beginning, the solitude and the silence had been hard for him on these wastelands peopled only by stones.” (Albert Camus, The Guest). The School building not only provided Daru with a shelter, but he had all sorts of facilities there. While the people of the plateau faced poverty, Daru had food, hens, dates and all other edibles. But sometimes even the most luxurious facilities cannot replace the feeling of solitudeness.

“In contrast with such poverty, he who lived almost like a monk in his remote schoolhouse, nonetheless satisfied with the little he had and with the rough life,…” Daru had accepted his physical isolation and was coping with it really well, until the stranger i.e. the Arab came. Daru’s solitude taught him the importance of freedom and free will thus when he was asked by Balducci that the Arab needs to be handed over to the police, DARU refused to cooperate. Although the only thing Drau knew about the Arab pointed out to a very negative trait of him, sill he wanted to set the Arab free (Eberhard Griem, 1993).

Since he lived in the school alone and in absolute desolate surrounding, thus the arrival of the guest gave him a companion and charged the mixed feelings of brotherhood in him. This emotion has been described by the writer as “He listened to that breath so close to him and mused without being able to go to sleep (Camus, The Guest and Existentialism). In this room where he had been sleeping alone for a year, this presence bothered him. But it bothered him also by imposing on him a sort of brotherhood he knew well but refused to accept in the present circumstances.

Men who share the same rooms, soldiers or prisoners, develop a strange alliance as if, having cast off their armor with their clothing, they fraternized every evening, over and above their differences, in the ancient community of dream and fatigue. But Daru shook himself; he didn't like such musings, and it was essential to sleep”. This story however also depicts various aspects of the French Colonism; Daru a school master was made to teach on a plateau, much against his will, by the government.

He taught children about France rather than their own native geography, as the black board had four rivers of France drawn to teach his students (Uncle Buster, “The Guest"). And since this story has been written at the beginning of the Algerian uprising against the French, therefore the apprehension between the Arab culture and the ruling French Government becomes the part of the story. Daru, a man who has been in loneliness for long enough understands the value of freedom. He unties the Arab and offers him tea and food.

Later, he goes much against the orders given to him, to free the Arab (Albert Camus,