Review of “The Star” by Arthur C. Clarke

It was one of those night skies that I will never forget.  The Milky Way galaxy was spread across the sky in all of its awesome glory.  Never before had I seen such splendor as this.  I felt its pulse, the same as I can feel my own.  The night sky felt alive!

I remember the moment well.  I was on maneuver in Hohenfels, Germany, and the night was calm and clear.  We were staging to go out into “the box,” as the training area was called, so there was little for us to do that evening but wait.  Given the remoteness of our location, there was virtually no light pollution in the sky, which set the evening’s mood perfectly for a star-filled sky the likes of which I had never seen.  I walked away from the buildings we were living in to find a secluded spot, away from the bustle of my comrades, and laid down upon a bed of grass to watch the night sky.  Many of my friends were busy playing spades or doing their laundry at the automat, but I wanted my peace away from it all.  I wanted to take in this rare moment, and I did.  I spent hours that evening just lying on the ground, watching the stars as they worked their way across the sky. Shooting stars cascaded across the night sky like mystical rain, and in that moment, I realized that the Earth was moving; the moon was more than a luminescent sphere in the sky, rather it was an instrument of perfect symmetry with the Earth, both dancing their waltz around the orbit of our sun.  I envisioned the sun casting its rays of light upon the surface of the moon, and how other planets took their rotational turn around the sun at that same moment.  The universe was moving, and I could feel its movement in my very soul.  I did nothing but watch on in wonder.  I had never taken a moment like this to myself, alone and self absorbed as I was to ponder and contemplate my place on this planet, an intricate system of life that is able to thrive because of oxygen and various other elements contained within its gravitational influence.  The only thing separating me from the vast openness of the universe was our atmosphere, a component to life on this planet that we often take for granted; for without it, we would be nothing but a lump of rock floating through space.  I stared out into the cosmos, enthralled by its complexity. Yet, lying there on the ground like that, observing the universe around me, made everything feel so simple, regardless of the complexity of the universe’s mechanics, if such a paradox could exist.  I was having an Olaf Stapledon moment.  To put it simply — I was awestruck.

One video found on TED by philosopher John Silva suggests that I am not the only one to have had a moment like this.  In fact, he claims that feelings of awestruck lend themselves to our biological advantage as a species for survival.  These moments of awe are what fuel our passion, imagination and will to learn about the universe we live in; they motivate and compel us to live not just in our present moment, but in the future.  While scientists seek to rationalize and explain the universe at large, others seek to explore the universe in their own way.  Their imaginations guide them into the cosmos, allowing those of us willing to listen along for the ride.  One such author is Arthur C. Clarke.  A Science Fiction (SF) writer of legendary status, his works explore the concepts of life beyond our planet and the full spectrum of the universe with such vivid imagery, it is inspiring to read his works.  SF writers who embrace the genre often use the compelling evidence of the scientific community and its discoveries to extend new questions derived from their findings to a new level, one where the imagination is only limited by the capacity of the writer.  Clarke was one of those writers who seemingly transcended what the genre was capable of, taking SF to new levels of the scientific imagination.  One of his short stories only affirms this, “The Star,” written in 1955 and published in The Nine Billion Names of God, an anthology of short stories signifying the best of his works.  While questions of faith and our place in the universe are central to the theme of this short narrative, anyone who picks up this story to read it will be left wondering about more than their relationship with a higher power, but about time and its influence over our lives.

When I finished reading it, I could not help but think back to that moment in Hohenfels, laying there in the dead of the night contemplating my existence.  All sense of time was lost, except for what the perpetual motion of the night sky afforded me.  The moon idly swept across the sky, and it felt as if I could feel the movement of the Earth below me. Actually, it made me feel small and puny, like an insect under a boot. I was not depressed by feeling infinitesimal, but rather I felt like a part of it.  My time and place on this planet are important to me; I am here now, living my life, and I feel I have a sense of self-worth in my daily affairs.  I live as others have lived before me.  I am learning about the world around from the voices of the past, as others have done before.   Reading this story made me realize that watching the night sky as I did that evening is looking upon the infinity of time, no different than any astronomer would do looking upon images through a telescope, such as the deep field image taken from the Hubble.  Astronomers and physicists are uncovering the past of the universe in the same way historians and archaeologists are unearthing our cultural identities.  I feel compelled to ask whether I am indeed a mortal being, or something much more than this, an immortal who will live on through the life that continues beyond me.  My role on this Earth may be a small fragment when compared to the grand scheme of the universe, but I have a role to play in it none-the-less, whatever that role may be.  Only by living will I be able to tell.

The Short Story

In Clarke’s “The Star,” humankind has a similar fascination with the stars, our exploration of them conflicting with our sense of self within the divine order of God’s will.  In fact, this is the central conflict within the story, played out by a protagonist who is a man of the cloth, ordained in the ways of the church, an institution in Clarke’s vision that has learned to embrace science as a means of justifying itself.  This father is not one you would find governing any parish on Earth, rather he is returning from an epic journey to the “Phoenix Nebula,” a cloud of dust born out of the cataclysmic ending of a star, a supernova.  Their original mission was to learn as much as possible about the process a star goes through to become a white dwarf, a body of mass incomparable to anything found on our Earth, and to analyze the aftermath of a supernova.  What they discover as they enter the dusty nebula is something quite unexpected.  By this point in the story, dated around 2500 A.D., we know that humanity has been trekking through the stars using a technology Clarke calls a “Transfinite drive.”  This engine allows us to move throughout the Cosmos in measurements of light years, quite necessary considering the distance to the Phoenix Nebula, which we learn to be over 100 light years away from our solar system.  What they find when they arrive, though, is quite extraordinary:  a planetary system that survived the destructive force of the supernova.  The narrator describes their initial reactions to the planet and what they found there: “The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantle of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days before the disaster.  We landed, and we found the Vault… Our original purpose was forgotten: this lonely monument, reared with such labor at the greatest possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning.  A civilization that knew it was about to die had made its last bid for immortality” (Clarke 306).  We learn from this expedition that everything this civilization sought to protect, the “fruits of their genius” were placed in this Vault on the most distant planet away from their unstable sun in the hopes that it would survive and someone would find it.  And, we did.

The weight of this discovery plays heavily on the crew of the ship, as it makes its return voyage back to Earth.  The father on board struggles with his faith in God and His will, having gained knowledge of their demise from interpreting their cultural records stored within the Vault.  Our narrator questions His motives, “This tragedy was unique.  It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth.  But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors — how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?” (307).    While it is an important question to ask in terms of our own race and how many of us see God’s influence over our lives, what I find more significant to this is the manner in which they rekindle their existence.  Granted, this terrestrial planet and its life forms cease to exist in a biological sense;  however, they live on in spirit and in mind through the discovery of their Vault.  It is only fitting that the nebula this crew discovers this extinct civilization in is called the “Phoenix Nebula.”  Like the mythical bird of legend, this culture raises out of the ashes of its planet’s ruin at the hands of its rogue star, having preserved remnants of their culture for another exploratory race to uncover.  Like archaeologists, the astronauts unearth the Vault and collect their secrets, secrets that were otherwise meant for immortalizing a race that was faced with its extinction.  This Vault is no different from a time capsule one would bury in the backyard.

Conclusion

I once buried a time capsule with my friends in the backyard.  My friends and I collected our things, action figurines and baseball cards mostly, and buried them in a lunchbox, in the hopes that one day someone from the future would find it.  Ironically, we have long since forgotten where we buried this relic; nevertheless, the concept of the time capsule remains the same in Clarke’s story.  This got me thinking — what would humanity place into its Vault if we learned that our sun was unstable and would nova in the near future?  How would we preserve our race for future beings to discover?  Would we place the National Archives in this Vault, preserving documents of significant importance to our civilization?  Would patents and manuscripts of our technologies be placed therein?  What about the blueprint of our own biological code, the Human Genome Project?  Would this be placed in the Vault, as well?  Or would we loss sight of ourselves, being taken over by the emotional burden of realizing the inevitable demise of our race? (I recall the Lars Van Trier film Melancholia to prove my point here)  I like to think we would keep our “cool” in the face of such peril, for the sake of continuity, just like this race of beings did when their star exploded.  After all, is that not the point of science and our ambition to chronicle our environment and to learn about the universe we live in?  To see to it that future generations are able to expand on this knowledge base, and to learn what it means to exist in the time-space continuum on this little planet we call Earth; one of eight (nine, if you’re still a believer) planets we inhabit in our solar system around the sun; one star that resides within the Milky Way Galaxy; one of many galaxies that make up the overwhelming vastness of the universe, and my description here really does it no justice.

I’m curious to know of my readers: have you ever buried a time capsule?  What did you place in it? 

Works Cited

Clarke, Arthur C. “The Star” (1955).  eFictions. Eds. Joseph Trimmer, Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. Boston: Heinle Thomson Learning, Inc., 2002. 303-307. Print.

Image source:  Inaglory, Brocken. “Perseid and the Milky Way.” 12 Aug. 2007. Image. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 06 Mar. 2012. Web. 13 Jul. 2013.

Review of “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner

On 10 December, 1950, William Faulkner delivered his banquet speech before the audiences attending the Nobel Prize Committee at the city hall in Stockholm, Sweden.  One can tell from his address that he is seemingly out of his element, coming from the deep South of Mississippi.  Anyone can listen to his address for free from the Nobel Prize website.  In it, Faulkner addresses an audience fully aware of what post-war political tensions are capable of, what with the Cold War and the powers involved posed as a threat to civilization.  Yet, he talks about modern writers of his time losing touch with their connection to the “human spirit,” something he claims, “which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”  He goes on to add:

He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid… Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands (Faulkner, “Banquet Speech”).

Faulkner writes this because he believes it entirely to be the truth of writing.  This isn’t some thought that he embellishes for the sake of the Nobel Prize Committee, but a philosophy that he has based his writing and life off of. In one instance, it is even recognizable in his earlier work: “Barn Burning,” a short story published in the June 1939 issue of Harper’s Magazine.  In this story, a conflict exists that sets the human spirit at odds with itself.  The struggle between what is morally right and a young man’s obligation to his family reveals the tragedy that exists within this literary piece.

 

The tragedy here is as much an economic one, as it is about a family being torn apart by a boy’s father and his actions.  Would Abner Snopes have burned barns at all if he didn’t have a grudge against the system that keeps him and his family impoverished?  In fact, modern readers may have an easier time recognizing poverty’s role in the awkward position this family is in, rather than a man’s downward spiral because of spite and contempt.  Faulkner captures how poor these people are with descriptive imagery that tells us how cheap and worn their lives have become.  For example, expressions like ” flutter of cheap ribbons” and “drew from the jumbled wagon bed a battered lantern, the other a worn broom” shows us enough of their world through minor details, revealing the root of their problem.  It is poverty and the reactions he receives from those who are not impoverished that poisons the father’s actions.  He sees himself and his family as victims from the plantation owners who use them for menial labor, something that Snopes is begrudging of all throughout the narrative.  Just after arriving at their new (albeit temporary) home, father announces, “‘I reckon I’ll have a word with the man that aims to begin tomorrow owning me body and soul for the next eight months'”(Faulkner “Barn” 221). Taking his son with him, they both make their way to see Major de Spain, the land owner he’ll be working for.  Sartoris, his son, sees the house of the Major de Spain as a sign of prosperity, a symbol of status and stability, something his life is devoid of; nevertheless, coming to this house gives him a sense of hope.  The negativity and contempt the father feels for his future employer, however, is clearly expressed both during, when he ruins the rug, and after, when he states: “He stood for a moment, planted stiffly on the stiff foot, looking back at the house. ‘ Pretty and white, ain’t it?’ he said.  ‘That’s sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain’t white enough yet to suit him.  Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it” (222).  This attitude he shows toward people of wealth is what creates friction in the story.

Contrary to statements like these, we learn from particular moments throughout the story that reveal he wasn’t always this way.  The tension in his character lifts at one point even when Snopes takes his sons into town, regardless of being late with the crops, unlike all the other farmers.  Stopping at the blacksmith shop, there is a moment where the reader is given a glimpse into Snopes’s former life: “His father and the smith and a third man squatting on his heels inside the door were talking, about crops and animals; the boy, squatting too in the ammoniac dust and hoof-parings and scales of rust, heard his father tell a long and unhurried story out of the time before the birth of the older brother even when he had been a professional horsetrader.  And then his father came up beside him where he stood before a tattered last year’s circus poster on the other side of the store, gazing rapt and quiet at the scarlet horses…” (Faulkner “Barn” 226).  The fact that he buys cheese for the three of them to eat and idles around a “tall rail fence… upon which men stood and sat” to watch horses trot back and forth in a ring seems out of character for the father up to this point in the narrative (227), quite in contrast to his stern demeanor toward his family witnessed earlier in the story.  Is this a moment into a former life, one that was prosperous and fulfilling, one that he ultimately lost touch with due to familial obligations or other reasons?  What ever this moment is, it is the source for his contempt.  He finds peace reminiscing about the days of his youth in these few moments with his boys.  It seems, though, that this is the source of his inner-turmoil, his regrets, his personal demons and why he takes his revenge out on people who did make it — by burning their barns, ruining their possessions, tarnishing the lives of others as his own life has been tarnished.

While the story seems predominantly about the Mr. Snopes, it is as much about his older son, “Colonel” Sartoris,  a boy who seems to be at conflict with this father’s actions.  The moral conflict rests between the father and the son, no one else.  All throughout the narrative, we get the sense that Sartoris is not happy with their overall situation — moving from house to house because of his father’s actions.  But he fears and respects his father’s motives for toying with fire at the same time: “The element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father’s being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion” (Faulkner “Barn” 220).  While it is something he understands, there is a desire to reveal what is happening to the authorities, something his father picks up on in the beginning of the story and pulls him off to the side, away from the rest of the family to discuss.  Snopes strikes him with the flat of his hand and tells his son that “‘you got to learn.  You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you.  Do you think either of them, any man there this morning, would?  Don’t you know all they wanted was a chance to get at me because they knew I had them beat? Eh?'”(220).   But Sartoris says nothing, thinking to himself, “‘If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again'” (220).  His father sees the same fire in his son and connects with him in many ways throughout the story.  The two of them are very much alike in how they respond to their environment: the father burning barns to express his repressed anger for his living conditions, and the son reacting rebelliously to this father’s lack of consideration for the family and for his emotional neglect.  All the other characters in the family are relatively passive and sheepish, settled in their misery with no one to help see their way out of it.  They rely on Snopes to survive, and he drags them into his downward spiral along the way.

Sartoris, his oldest son, is the one character in the story, though, who struggles with his father’s personal vendettas and constantly seeks to alleviate their burdens by convincing his father not to take his aggressions out with fire.  In the final act, where Snopes sets himself upon retribution toward Major de Spain for the high fine price from the ruined rug, Sartoris breaks away from the clutches of his mother and rushes off to the plantation to warn Major de Spain of his father’s intentions.  The act of betrayal towards his own bloodline is finalized when he hears shots ringing off in the distance.  Walking along the road, Sartoris walks away from the situation, liberated and free from the conflict embedded within his conscience.  The bond to his family is severed by his actions, and he never looks back at his family, reminders of the misery and emotional bondage enforced by his father.  Faulkner uses imagery and colors to work this motif throughout his story, too.  Although they are a white family, references to iron-like shades of black are constantly made throughout the story.  His father is often described as “a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tine and without heat like tin” (220).  This emotional emptiness on his father’s part is the poison that taints the well; it is the source of his anguish and his personal depression with the world around him.  It is the sickness of his human spirit.

Going back to that moment in Stockholm, Sweden, Faulkner finalizes his thoughts before the audiences of the Nobel prize committee as if he were referring to Sartoris, himself.  He says: “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”  Having betrayed his father, the son walks into the night, among the whippoorwills and dark trees around him, and he does not look back.  He is immortalized in this moment of release, having saved his soul from the same moral corruption that haunted his father’s spirit.  His sacrifice is one that liberated, not only himself from the bonds of obligation at the expense of truth and justice, but also of his family.  Even though he walks away from them, he saves them from further punishments that might have came with his father’s neglect.  This can be seen as an act of mercy or of selfishness by the reader.  But in the end, he has learned his lesson in fear and is ready to take on the world before him, much in the same way Faulkner did himself when he sat down to write this story.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. “Banquet Speech” (1950).  Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967. Ed. Horst Frenz.  Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969. Nobelprize.org. Web. 05 Mar. 2013.

Faulkner, William. “Barn Burning” (1939). Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. Ed. Ann B. Dobie. Boston: Heinle Thomson Learning, Inc. (2002): 217-229. Print.

Image source: “Barn Burning in Bellevue.” [Image]. Frompo. Frompo, 2015. Web. 09 Apr. 2015.

“The Guest” from Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus

Are we ever really alone?  There comes a point in your life when you realize that people are dependent on you, or vice verse.  Children are dependent on their parents; parents, in turn, are dependent on social commitments, for they have responsibilities to those whom they provide for.  Even if you don’t have children, you seek out connections with other people, whether those are through common interest or romance.  We want to feel connected to other people, and for good reason.  You’ll see this in a cafe, where people meet to socialize — in an office, where people are working together to see a task through — in a school, where children are learning about the world they live in — even in the “Lonely Hearts” column of a newspaper, where men and women of all ages seek out partners with subtly written adverts about themselves.  What I am doing right now, writing this critique, alone and to myself in the basement of my home, is a way for me to feel connected to others, such as yourselves, even if I don’t know you. 

David Copper, a professor of philosophy at the University of Durham, tells us that “a perennial concern of philosophy has been to confront an alienation of man from the world which science, language or metaphysical speculation may threaten…. Either man is just one more kind of thing in nature, or nature is itself a constituent of his consciousness” (Cooper 25).  To think about my desire to be surrounded or noticed by other human beings leaves me to think that it is inherent in my sense of self to do so.  After all, do I not learn a sense of who I am through others?  But, not everyone longs for this sense of connection.  There are those who desire to be distant, alone, introvert.  “The Guest” by Albert Camus, originally published in his collection of short stories Exile and the Kingdom in 1957, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is clearly a story where the protagonist, Daru, is at odds with humanity.  He desires solitude, and that is what this story delivers, even at the expense of the moral consequences involved.

Largely inspired by the Algerian War during the 1950s, Camus writes about his protagonist’s struggles to accept what he is ordered to do in what would appear to be sympathies toward an Arab prisoner.  Whether those sympathies are drawn from his devotion toward helping others in need — the protagonist is after all a schoolmaster — or if they are more politically motivated, something that would not fall short of Camus’s talent, this remains unclear.  But, what we learn from the story is the protagonist’s desire to alleviate himself from this burdensome task.  No doubt, an analysis on the effects of isolation can be drawn from this story, even if Camus never intended for such a reading. 

The story begins with Balducci, an Army officer, bringing an Arab prisoner to Daru, the main protagonist who runs charity for impoverished people from a schoolhouse in the middle of the desert upon a plateau.  It is clear from early on that he wants to be alone at the schoolhouse, for his demeanor toward this officer and his charge are in the least bit welcoming.  He is astonished even when Balducci explains that the reason he is there is to pass the responsibility for the prisoner over to him, to take him to Tinguit, a nearby town, where both of them are expected at police headquarters.  This doesn’t settle well with Daru, so much so that he revolts against Balducci by refusing to hand this captive over to the authorities, even against the orders set upon him.

To Daru, this Arab prisoner placed in his charge disrupts the solace he has had upon this plateau in the desert.  Cooper summarizes the early nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by telling us how alienation remains a fundamental feature of man’s consciousness.  That by separating himself, and thus opposing his very nature, he can remove himself from his natural life and become recluse in the new environment he finds himself in.  He quotes Hegel:  “Its subsequent history is that of further ‘withdrawal out of its happy natural life, into the night of self-consciousness’; followed by the long attempt to ‘reconstruct… the reality… from which it has been separated'” (qtd. in Cooper 26).  The Arab, suddenly in Daru’s presence, seems to represent “the night of self-consciousness” that Hegel discusses, for his company on this evening seems to upset the way Daru has chosen to live his life.  By living remotely in the desert, atop a plateau no less, Daru feels uneasy now when social obligations require him to watch an Arab prisoner, a person whose name we never even learn.

In the middle of the night, Daru was still not asleep.  He had gone to bed after undressing completely; he generally slept naked.  But when he suddenly realized that he had nothing on, he hesitated.  He felt vulnerable and the temptation came to him to put his clothes back on (Camus 253). 

In this first instance, he is made conscientious of his nakedness, a thought that never occurred to him in his isolation and a further indicator of how removed he is from society.  Could his hesitation be a sense of shame that he feels in the presence of another human being?  The Arab’s presence even rekindles thoughts of his life before he became secluded in the schoolhouse in the desert.

In this room where he had been sleeping alone for a year, this presence bothered him.  But it bothered him also by imposing on him a sort of brotherhood he knew well but refused to accept in the present circumstances.  Men who share the same rooms, soldiers or prisoners, develop a strange alliance as if, having cast off their armor with their clothing, they fraternized every evening, over and above their differences, in the ancient community of dream and fatigue (Camus 254). 

But the schoolmaster is not able to sleep, unlike the Arab who finds solace in company.  After all, there are subtle hints in the narration that reveal Daru’s nonchalant demeanor toward the prisoner.  He doesn’t fulfill the role of a jailor in the same sense as Balducci from earlier in the story; rather, he is annoyed by the Arab and seeks to distance himself from the prisoner by remaining defiant against the orders issued to him.  The Arab knows his sense of purpose, even if that is to live in confinement as a prisoner.  Daru, however, is at odds with his new-found responsibilities, for he doesn’t recognize his obligations in the same way.  He motivates himself only in ways to be rid of his commitment to this prisoner. 

His final decision in the story is what releases him of his association to the prisoner, allowing him to return to the life he had before.  His thoughts are clear on his motivations for this decision, too, when it is made known:

That man’s stupid crime revolted him, but to hand him over was contrary to honor.  Merely thinking of it made him smart with humiliation.  And he cursed at one and the same time his own people who had sent him this Arab and the Arab too who had dared to kill and not managed to get away (Camus 255). 

Instead of delivering him personally to the “administration and the police”, to save his face from the statements he made to Balducci earlier in the story, he releases him — gives him food and money even — to turn himself in to the authorities for his crime.  Confused by this at first, the Arab reluctantly goes off into the distance and eventually disappears, the reader not knowing if his journey will be a liberating one.  Daru, however, is glad to be rid of the responsibility forced onto him and returns back to the school.  We find traces for his reluctance to leave made known to us earlier in the story:  “This is the way the region was, cruel to live in, even without men — who didn’t help matters either.  But Daru had been born here.  Everywhere else, he felt exiled” (Camus 248).  There are many reasons for his staying behind: his sense of honor keeps him from going to town to deliver his prisoner; his home being the only place where he feels at ease and himself; and his reluctance to give up his solitude.  As Cooper points out about the Existentialist, the only way to really exercise a true sense of freedom is to break away from the “‘Public’, the ‘herd’ or the ‘they'”, which will undeniably cause confrontation when he finds himself in contact with society again (33).  I think this is true of Camus’s protagonist, a character for whom we find taking extreme measures to remain in isolation, to remain distant and removed from society.  They are extreme in that his decision, his sense of honor even, goes against the moral reasons for the prisoner being in his custody to begin with.  This man committed a crime — he murdered his cousin — so to release him the way Daru does conflicts with society’s laws, but this is nothing he concerns himself with.  He takes these measures for the sake of remaining in his solitude.  In essence, he is a hermit, alone on his plateau.  He chooses to remain alienated and distant from everyone else, regardless of the consequences he may face for having done so.  The last line of the story ends with the very word that we can imagine is on his mind the whole time: alone.

It remains a relative question then as to whether a person can really be alone.  There may be a desire to distant one’s self from family or friends, much like Daru has done by taking up residence at the schoolhouse in the desert.  Society, though, will always be there and will always keep tabs on its constituents, much like the officer Balducci does, when he comes bearing orders for Daru.  This implies that Daru was thought about at some earlier point when the Arab prisoner was apprehended.  While Daru may have been alone in his schoolhouse, someone in town was thinking about him.  Why else would the officer take the prisoner up to him in the first place?  If nothing else, it serves as a good backdrop for a narrative, which Camus has made into an enjoyable story.  As to the question of whether someone can ever truly be alone, at least in my mind, it remains to be seen. 

Works Cited

 Camus, Albert. “The Guest” from Exile and the Kingdom (1957). eFictions. eds. Joseph Trimmer, C. Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. Boston: Thomson Learning, Inc., 2002. 247-256. Print. 

Cooper, David A. Existentialism: A Reconstruction. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999. Print.