The Guest

As a short story, “The Guest” is structurally aligned with Aristotle’s conception of theatrical drama. Composed around 330 BCE, the philosopher’s renowned Poetics spells out that dramatic works must be presented through a tripartite structure comprising a beginning, a middle, and an end—or, as the segments have become known in narrative fiction, a setup, a confrontation, and a resolution. Also akin to the Aristotelian model is Camus’s adherence to the three unities: those of time, of place, and of action. Indeed, “The Guest” takes place over the course of a 24-hour period in the same desolate expanse of Algerian landscape, and its action consists of only one storyline.

Camus’s drama pivots around a choice that evolves into a turning point in Daru’s life. While the specifically remote Algerian landscape—whose vicissitudes the author details at great length such that, viewed alongside the area’s climate, it becomes an antagonist in the tale—is significant in the context of a story unfurling at the onset of the 1950s Algerian War, the fact that Daru inhabits an unnamed area, coupled with the lack of specificity in the characters’ names—the