The Sheltering Sky

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1949

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1, Chapters 1-9

Book 1, Chapters 10-17

Book 2, Chapters 18-25

Book 3, Chapters 26-30

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Colonial Encounters: The Imperial Gaze

The Sheltering Sky employs colonial tropes throughout its narrative—from the heat and dust to the vastness of the (uninhabited) space to the limitlessness of time—and reveals the fraught nature of how Western travelers move through colonial territory. It is invariably the case that colonial encounters provide an opportunity for misunderstandings, misapprehensions, and mistakes. The intersection in which the privileged Westerner interacts with the colonized native is troubled by assumptions, prejudices, and fears born of entrenched narratives of power and control.

In Book 1, Port’s encounter with Smail is freighted with threat, potential aggression, and misunderstandings:

No one stared at them. One would have said that the presence of the Arab beside him made him invisible. But now he was no longer sure of the way. It would never do to let this be seen. He continued to walk straight ahead as if there was no doubt in his mind (20).

The hierarchy demands Port be in control, though he is lost—and clearly afraid. Smail takes him to a brothel, where he will nearly be robbed by the prostitute with whom he cannot even communicate. In his panic, he loses his wallet himself. Later, Port will long for a blind native woman with whom he will actually be invisible, as well as mute, losing himself in the fantasy of immersion. Just as Port wishes to be a traveler—one who enmeshes himself in a foreign culture—rather than a tourist, he wishes to lose himself, and all his doubts and anxieties, in the flesh of the foreign woman.

The imperial gaze also dominates—and distorts—the interactions between Westerners and the locals. When Port sits alone at the hotel bar, he thinks about happiness, which he imagines belongs to the natives with their primitive “alleys where the cats gnawed fish-heads” and “beyond the mountains in the great Sahara, in the endless regions, that were all of Africa” (52). But, disappointed by his current surroundings, happiness is “not here in this sad colonial room where each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room” (52). Port romanticizes Africa’s vast, mysterious places while critiquing the imitative squalor of the colonial spaces; this glosses over the privilege that the Western tourist possesses, with the freedom and financial means to travel anywhere, to inscribe meaning onto those foreign places.

Indeed, this is at the heart of the imperial mission, to name and define the Other, to possess and control those Other spaces. Even on the final page of the book, there is a catalog of names—almost like the epic catalog—that proves, to anyone whose gaze turns toward this foreign land, that the colonizers were there: The taxi cab “started up the hill past the Café d’Eckmuhl-Noiseux where the awnings flapped in the evening breeze, past the Bar Metropole with its radio that roared, past the Café de France, shining with mirrors and brass” (335). The native spaces have been named, defined, inhabited, and inscribed with European (here, French) tastes and modern accouterments. Port longs for a place beyond the reach of the European, deep within the “famous silence of the Sahara” (209). Yet, he is implicated in the processes by which these native places are appropriated for Western intentions.

That Sheltering Sky: Looking into the Abyss

Unsurprisingly, one of the most significant symbols in the book is the sky: It signifies various ideas, depending on the characters’, primarily Port’s, moods. He tries to explain what he means by the sheltering sky to Kit: “The sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind” (100). Kit nervously asks what might be behind the sky, and Port answers, “[n]othing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night” (101). The answer terrifies her, understandably, as neither she nor Port has even determined how it is that they should live—much less prepare for how they are to die. The fact that only darkness and nothingness exist just beyond the thin scrim of the sky intensifies the existential crisis in which they both find themselves. Their aimless travels and meandering conversations highlight their lack of faith, a belief in anything more significant than themselves, and a void of purpose. Indeed, while they have this conversation about the sky and their lives, an “old Arab sat buried in his prayers,” within earshot of the conversation, “severe and statue-like in the advancing dusk” (101). This juxtaposition highlights the firmness of the Arab’s faith versus the uncertainty of the Moresbys’ philosophical predicament.

Later, though, Port finds comfort in taking possession of the sky and the landscape over which it presides: He tells Kit, “I feel like this town, this river, this sky, all belong to me as much as to them” (122), referring to the natives. While Kit thinks him “crazy,” she only tells him that his views are “strange” (122). Port’s search for meaning and purpose leads him to inscribe his identity onto and assert his ownership over the foreign land, through which he at first moves with impunity. However, these overly confident pronouncements very quickly turn against him, and the landscape and sky that once provide comfort become adversaries: “He knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking. […] He did not want to face the intense sky, too blue to be real” (165). This observation comes after he has lost his passport, the document that would prove his (white, Western, wealthy) rightful dominance, his privileged identity, and support his grandiose claims.

As he hallucinates, dying alone in his hospital room, Port again has the vision of the sheltering sky:

He opened his eyes, shut his eyes, saw only the thin sky stretched across to protect him. Slowly the split would occur, the sky draw back, and he would see what he had never had doubted lay behind advance upon him with the speed of a million winds (243).

He cries out, in pain and fear, as the sky’s shelter retreats, and he is faced only with the abyss of death. The further he has traveled into the desert, the more lost he has become, and the illusion of protection falls away.

Finally, Kit herself remembers this vision of the sheltering sky: After Port’s death, her disappearance, and ordeal, she has been returned to the brusque—even brutal—hands of the Western forces who will “rescue” her from the desert. As the plane takes off, she sees

[T]he violent blue sky—nothing else. For an endless moment, she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound, it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above (328).

All she can do is remain frozen, trapped in the anxiety and fear that “[a]t any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed” (328). Death, the abyss, awaits everyone, and neither Port nor Kit find solace in their brief sojourn under the bright, hot, only momentarily sheltering sky.

Divergent Journeys: Port and Kit

Port and Kit Moresby are married, though the reader will be hard-pressed to understand what brought them together in the first place: They have different goals, contradictory thoughts, and incompatible personalities. Their inability to communicate with each other leads to the book’s central conflict: Kit’s indiscretion with Tunner and her all-consuming guilt after the betrayal. While Port’s self-absorption impedes his ability to see Kit clearly, Kit’s anxieties compromise her judgment. He will arrogantly refuse inoculations, which ultimately leads to his death—his final parting from her—while she will allow her fears to drive her into the arms of male “protectors” who have anything but her best interests at heart. Port’s journey ends tragically with his death; however, it could be argued that Kit’s journey ends even more catastrophically in trauma and permanent exile.

Port’s death is shrouded in horror. It is not merely his existential crisis, as he writhes in fever-induced delirium, that invokes the horrific; it is also Kit’s terror in having to care for him. She says to herself, “[h]ere I am, in the middle of horror’ […] attempting to exaggerate the situation, in the hope of convincing herself that the worst had happened, was actually there with her. But it would not work” (214). “The horror, the horror,” of course, are the last words spoken by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s classic novel of colonialism, Heart of Darkness. The association is not accidental: Kurtz’s death, like Port’s, is precipitated by his going too deeply into the foreign land, of sympathizing too fully with the native. As Port himself thinks, in his delirium, “[i]t was an existence of exile from the world” (232). He has gone too far, separated himself too completely from civilization, to be able to come back. He can only, as in his final thoughts, “[r]each out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose” (245).

As Port’s journey concludes, Kit’s journey of self-imposed exile begins. She will take herself even further from the pathways of civilization, giving herself over not only to the desert but to the men of the desert, the traveling Arabs and Bedouins who keep her body alive in exchange for possession of it. Her dissociation is so significant that she begins to consider her rapist a consensual lover: “Little by little she found herself considering him with affection: Everything he did, all his overpowering little attentions were for her” (285). In time, as his prisoner, she is tormented by his absences, by the deliberate withdrawal of his attentions: After a sexual encounter, “she lay half awake, bathing in an aura of mindless contentment, a state which she quickly grew to take for granted, and then, like a drug, to find indispensable” (306). She is, indeed, addicted to the trauma and the abuse that are proffered in the guise of affection and protection. Like Port, it also marks her as a Westerner with her own imperial gaze: She is addicted to the erotic, exotic foreign Other in a far-away colonial land.

Ultimately, though, like a 19th-century heroine who has been corrupted, Kit must be punished for her transgressions. In a 20th-century upgrade, however, she is not fated to die—like Tess Durbeyfield or Edna Pontellier (or like her husband, Port). Instead, she must endure those horrific assaults on her body and her psyche and finally face her despoiler turned rescuer, Tunner. When Miss Ferry, her escort from the American consulate, tells her that Tunner is likely already waiting for her at the hotel, Kit reacts with shock and terror: “Mrs. Moresby sat like a stone figure. Her face, now in the shadows cast by the passersby, now full in the light of the electric sign at the hotel entrance, had changed so utterly that Miss Ferry was appalled” (334). She believes Kit to be “nuts!” (334). While Kit’s body will be safely returned to the colonial hotel and, ultimately, to home in New York, her mind will reside in a state of permanent exile from her former self, her former life. As the book concludes, in what could be read as a pronouncement on Kit’s fate, “it was the end of the line” (335).