32 pages • 1 hour read
Paul BowlesA Distant Episode
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
The Professor
Content Warning: The story and this guide discuss extreme violence, captivity, and enslavement. The guide also references imperialism.
From the story’s outset, the professor is portrayed as passive and slightly naive. Although he is presumably middle-aged and well-educated, there is something wide-eyed about him, and he seems to have a fetishized view of the country he is visiting. On the bus journey he reminisces about his first trip to the “warm country” 10 years prior and his “fairly firm friendship” with a local café owner (Paragraph 1), but the narrator then reveals that this supposed friend stopped writing to the professor after only a year. This establishes the professor’s basic relationship to the country: His interest in it is earnest but also slightly presumptuous, premised on a colonialist sense of privilege that the professor himself does not recognize. Consequently, the professor also fails to understand why the Algerians he encounters—from the “scornful” bus driver, to the gruff qaouaji, to Hassan Ramani himself—might resent him.
This central misperception renders the professor vulnerable, and even before the professor is led out of town by the qaouaji, he is portrayed in such a way as to suggest that he is out of his depth. He has prepared for his trip, having brought his “sun lotions” and speaking with the qaouaji in the Algerian Arabic that “he had taken four years to learn” (Paragraph 9), yet none of these preparations are relevant to the situation he will encounter. On their walk out of town, the professor is repeatedly unable to drive the conversation in a way that would allow him to ascertain the qaouaji’s intentions, ultimately allowing himself to be led to his own demise.
After being taken captive by the Reguibat and having his tongue cut out, he falls into a stupor and immediately falls into compliance with his captors, living with them for a year and complying with their degrading treatment of him. The passivity and ineffectualness telegraphed in the first half of the story pave the way for this complete capitulation to his situation; his regression to an animalistic state also reflects his sense of the situation itself as “primitive” and irrational. At the end of the story, the professor does regain his memories of his past self, but this knowledge proves unbearable, and he flees into the desert. It seems that there was never a point when the professor was fully in control of his own destiny.
The Qaouaji
The qaouaji, or café attendant, is perhaps the most significant secondary character in the story. Even the way that he is referred to, via an untranslated Arabic word (the word qaouaji literally means café attendant), aims to suggest foreignness to the presumed Western reader. In terms of personality, his seriousness and gruffness contrast with the professor’s passiveness and relative naivete. Unlike the professor, he is laconic, and his responses to the professor’s attempt to draw him out are ambiguous and evasive, as can be seen in the following exchange:
‘Is it far?’ [the professor] asked, casually.
‘Are you tired?’ countered the qaouaji.
‘They are expecting me back at the Hotel Saharien,’ he lied.
‘You can’t be there and here,’ said the qaouaji (Paragraphs 28-31).
Rather than directly answering the professor’s question, the qaouaji instead poses a question of his own. That his question is one suggested by the professor’s concern about the distance lends further ambiguity to the interaction; it is unclear just how intentional the qaouaji’s evasion is. Moreover, the professor responds with an evasion of his own designed to forestall any attempts the qaouaji might make on his life. The exchange suggests that mistrust (and therefore miscommunication) is fundamental to interactions between the colonizer and the colonized due to the ever-present threat of violence—a feature of colonialism itself.
Even at the times when the qaouaji is engaging the professor in a nominally respectful or friendly way, his actions have a distancing effect. When the professor gives the qaouaji a large tip, for example, he responds with a “grave bow”—an act that highlights the power difference between the two men. The qaouaji’s insistence on using French to speak to the professor similarly suggests resentment of the professor’s association with colonialism. The qaouaji is also portrayed as savvy and manipulative, extracting a cigarette from the professor right before he takes leave of him. Taken together, these details suggest that the qaouaji brings the professor to the Reguibat to put him in danger. However, because the reader sees the qaouaji through the professor’s eyes, his character is never objectively rendered.
The Reguibat Tribesmen
In the professor’s encounters with the Reguibat, almost none of the tribespeople are described individually. They are almost always described as a collective, and this anonymity highlights their otherness in the professor’s eyes. One of the rare Reguibat tribesmen who are described individually is the man who brutally cuts out the professor’s tongue. The story provides no explanation for this act, arguably playing into Orientalist stereotypes of tribal people as not only cruel, but incomprehensibly so. For example, the story says that “there [is] a good deal of merriment” when the professor is taken captive by the Reguibat (Paragraph 64). Even the women and children treat the professor’s cruel treatment and enslavement as a matter of course. However, the context of French colonialism (and the real-world Reguibat’s resistance to it) suggests that the Reguibat may be responding to the professor as an avatar of Western imperialism.
