Essays on Daru

The Guest is a short story written by Albert Camus and first published as a part of the collection Exile and the Kingdom in 1957. The main character of the story is a teacher in a remote school Daru. The man was alone because of the snowfall, until gendarme Balducci with the apprehended Arabic person appeared. Daru was asked to take prisoner to a nearby town Tinguit where he would be tried for relative’s murder. The teacher did not want to take part in these events, but Balducci still left Arab in the school. Daru did not treat ...

Camus, A. “The Guest.” Exile and the Kingdom. London: Penguin, 2006. 43-56. Print. In 1957, Albert Camus wrote a short story The Guest, which became a part of his famous collection of stories Exile and the Kingdom. The scene is laid in French Algeria. The main characters of the story are Daru, a young Frenchman who lives in the desert mountains and works as a teacher, the old Corsican gendarme Balducci, and an Arab who has no name. One day, Daru sees Balducci and an Arab climbing up a mountain towards the school. Balducci tells Daru that he was ...

1- Sheikh Zaabalawi

What does Sheikh Zaabalawi represent? Is he symbolic of anything in particular, or does he represent many things at once?  (Try and use specifics from the text to support your argument.) Zaabalawi is not just a man who can perform miracles and cure the body. The narrator’s search for him also represents a search for the mystical, a search for religious discipline. In that way, Zaabalawi comes to represent God. 2 - "Zaabalawi"--thinking about illness

The narrator’s illness is never defined because it is not just a physical illness. It represents more an eponymous malaise that ...

According to Albert Camus in his work The Myth of Sisyphus, man is engaged in a futile search for meaning, as the world itself is completely devoid of significant and universal truths. He compares life to the myth of Sisyphus, the Greek figure who was doomed to roll a boulder up a mountain, only to never reach the top. Instead of giving up and embracing oblivion, however, Camus believes that "The struggle itselfis enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy" (Camus 1955, PAGE). Sisyphus becomes the embodiment of Camus’ absurd hero – a man who attempts to persevere in a world that ...

Questions

1. What lessons does the reader learn as he travels with Marlow down the Congo River? In Joseph Conrad’s he reader learns the lessons that the line separating “civilization” from “savagery” is much thinner than Marlow suspects in the beginning. The further he goes down the river, the further he moves away from civilization. But while the physical moving away form civilization is obvious, it is the mental, internal moving away which is most interesting to the theme of the novel. Marlow learns that it takes little for a person to lose touch with the civilization that they ...

Camus's "The Guest" (pp. 1580-97). As the story ends, Daru seems to be threatened with a consequence he doesn’t deserve. Is this just? Is there any way he could have created a good outcome? Why do you think Camus chooses to end the story this way? As it has been indicated in the post, Daru’s situation is one that portrays the diverse view through which the society perceives an individual. In the need to seek to establish a good rapport with the society, Daru lets the prisoner decide on which way to go-the escape route or the way ...

A short story is a work of fiction that does not comprise the complexity and length of a novel or novella, but still tells a complete story with drawn-out characters and fully-developed plots. Often, since short stories do not get the chance to tell full stories with characters they get the time to develop, they have a much stronger focus on theme as a narrative device, telling stories with messages instead of using numerous plot points. To my mind, there are two different categories of short story: tales of understanding, and tales of terror. These are fairly vague definitions that cover a wide variety of ...

In Camus' "The Guest," Existentialism is king; the desolation and isolation seen in the story is evidence of the emptiness of people's lives without a higher power. In this essay, the environment and mood of the short story will be reviewed as a criticism of Existentialism.

The setting of the short story is the desert region of Algeria; there is nothing in or around Daru's home. Food and water are scarce, and there is no one in any direction to speak of. This provides a unique sense of isolation for Daru, as well as anyone who would be in that situation. "This ...