The Guest

Animals appear throughout the course of the “The Guest,” both literally and metaphorically, as a means of qualifying humans and their actions. In the story’s first paragraph, the vivid description of the horse straining to walk on the stony terrain and breathe in frigid conditions figures more prominently than that of its rider or the footman, no doubt because, in the distance, Daru can only make out the horse, owing to its size. This being the case, the horse’s position in the story’s hierarchy of sentient beings is ironic: Larger and physically more powerful than humans, the animal is nevertheless dominated by people, for whom it serves as a beast of burden—a vital component of human functioning in the region. Sheep also figure in the story’s exposition: As Daru reflects on the lengthy drought that preceded the recent blizzard, the narrator remarks that thousands of sheep—and even some humans here and there—have perished from starvation.

While initially the dichotomy between people and animals appears readily discernable, Camus describes humans as animals—or by assigning them animalistic traits—thereby blurring the distinction among varying forms of living creatures. For example, when Daru and Balducci first debate the former’s role in “following orders,” the gendarme explains that his superior has ordered him to hand the Arab over to Daru; in the original French, the gendarme uses the specific words “confier ce zèbre” (88), the last word literally denoting a zebra and occasionally employed in French parlance to signify a “guy,” as rendered by the story’s translator. Shortly thereafter, as the gendarme approaches him, Daru catches his whiff of “leather and horseflesh” (69)—animal skin coupled with fleshy, meaty parts. When taking in the Arab’s face before bedtime in an attempt to understand his potential capacity for murder, Daru notes his animal-like mouth.

At Daru’s inquiry regarding the Arab’s crime, Balducci describes the prisoner’s purported brutal murder of his cousin in terms of humans slaughtering sheep, after which the schoolmaster “felt a sudden wrath against the man, against all men with their rotten spite, their tireless hates, their blood lust” (68). Even with indigenous peoples revolting in the region, Daru refuses to stoop to the level of the Arab’s putative murder by handing him over to authorities. As a human, he prefers to employ his sense of morality and reason to choose his actions rather than acting out of pure animal instinct. If humans do have the capacity to choose their actions, they can decide to refrain from acting according to human-imposed hierarchies—no doubt justified by the natural rule by force that instinctually drives killing for survival in the animal kingdom—and select neutrality and individual free choice over violence, as espoused by Camus’s philosophy.