The Guest

The guest is a story that describes the situation of a schoolmaster, called Daru, who has suddenly received an Arabic guest in his school. This school is the place where he lives. It is remote, empty, and situated in the desert What is special about this guest is that he didn’t come voluntarily. An old Corsican gendarme, who’s called Balducci, brought him. The gendarme asked Daru to take the Arab to the prison, which is some kilometres away from the school, and he told him that this Arab killed his cousin in a fight. That’s why he is expected at the police station. This what put the schoolmaster in a critical situation that needed a wisdom in order to take a critical decision. A sharp discussion took place between the gendarme and the schoolmaster that ended by the leaving the gendarme and the staying of the Arab.

The presence of the Arab in the school, made Drau feel uncomfortable. At the end the Arab was dropped in the middle of the route from where he could chose whether to go to jail or to the pasturelands and the nomads where he headed to the jail. As soon as Daru got back to his school, he found a sentence written on the board of his school, “you handed over our brother. You will pay for it”.

A lesson that we can learn from this text is, when reading and discovering how bad is the situation of the place, where the schoolmaster lives, and then, we find out that these conditions become a comfort zone for Daru.

What is surprising is that after having the idea and trying to imagine how rough it would be to live in such a cold, empty and remote place, we discovered that Daru transferred these conditions into advantages in his life and into conditions that he enjoyed them. For instance, he got used to loneliness, until the point that the presence of a guest made him feel unsafe and uncomfortable. He got used to silence until the point that the sound of the breathing of his guest was annoying. Daru was not an exceptional man who naturally loves to be alone in a remote places. It wasn’t either a psychological problem that makes him love to live in such situation. 

It is just because he was a wise and a brave man who resisted and accepted happily what live gives him. We can be sure by reading “It was the silence that had seemed painful to him during the first days here, after the war”. Which means that things didn’t look the same at the beginning, so there was an effort right there, and there was a good management of what life gave to him because based on the writer, the conditions were not preferable for him.

What we can learn from this is that, we can always generate happiness in our life, whatever the conditions are; we can always make out of our life a special one, even by the things that we think, at the beginning, are atrocious. We can always make our life looks beautiful., but most importantly, Nonot in the sight of the people around, but in our sights. It is just that we have to be convinced and satisfied with the inputs that life give us and think only about how to make out of them a good out puts instead of wondering why we don’t have enough inputs.

Decision-making, strong personality and convenience. These are the three points that the text touches, which are important in every human life because in each move we make we need to take a decision. In order to take a good decision we need a certain level of strength in our personality. When we don’t have the choice, or in other words, we can’t make the decision that we are comfortable with, we need to be convenience.