The Guest

This two-room structure serving as Daru’s home and workplace sits part-way up a hill overlooking a vast, barren plateau. Literally a locus for teaching future generations, this humble structure symbolizes the potential of education in an area so inhospitable to life—with 75% of its ground surface area covered by stones, virtually no farming is possible in this nameless expanse of land—that its few residents regularly experience bouts of famine.

Given that “The Guest” takes place towards the end of French colonial rule in Algeria, Daru is responsible for instructing his 20 or so pupils according to the dictates of the highly centralized French education system, which, in addition to ensuring that students master reading, writing, and basic mathematical skills, dictates that instructors inculcate children with values of the French Republic such that they flourish into ideal citizens.

As the primary space of the story’s setting, the schoolhouse is an embedded area, a parenthetical bubble created by the colonial French government in the middle of a barren stretch of land in Algeria. Lacking in student population in the best of times, in the story the schoolhouse is cold and empty, with nobody for Daru to teach.