The Guest Study Guide

Albert Camus was a French-Algerian author, philosopher, and journalist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44 in 1957, making him one of the youngest recipients of the Nobel in history. Camus was born in Mondovi, French Algeria, to a “Pied-Noir” family. This word means “black feet,” and it’s a disparaging term for people of European descent who were born in Algeria during the time of French colonial rule. Camus was a French subject, but because he grew up in Algeria, he never felt fully integrated into French society. His mother was Spanish, and his French-Algerian father died in World War I. He was raised with very little money in the Belcourt section of the city of Algiers. Camus moved to Paris just before the outbreak of World War II, staying in France for the rest of his life. The author is best known for his contributions to the philosophy of absurdism and existentialism, which he explored extensively in his best-known works The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947). These ideas stress the importance of free will and agency in a chaotic and meaningless world. “The Guest”—called “L’Hôte” in French, which can mean both “Guest” and “Host”—comes from his book Exile and the Kingdom, which was published in 1957. Despite his short life—he died in a car accident in 1960, just three years after winning the Nobel Prize—Camus had a significant influence on Western philosophy and literature. His works have been published and taught in almost every country in the world.

“The Guest” is set during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), a time of intense conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front. Algerians wanted independence from France, which the French colonizers strongly resisted. The story reflects the challenging moral decisions that individual people had to face when living in a divided country. Conditions for the Algerian people under foreign rule were harsh and exacting, which “The Guest” demonstrates in its depictions of colonial law. In a broader sense, Camus’s writings can also be understood in the context of the Existentialist movement that was prominent in Europe in the mid-20th century. Following the devastation of World War II, writers working in this genre tried to represent the search for meaning in a world that seemed increasingly absurd and chaotic. Camus’s writing suggests that although the world itself might be harsh and indifferent, people can still find meaning in trying to make good moral choices.

The philosophical leanings of Camus’s work relate to the writings of existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, Camus repeatedly and publicly rejected being labeled as an existentialist. Like Sartre and Nietzsche, Camus’s writing is particularly notable for its explorations of alienation, solitude, and moral ambiguity. His novels The Plague and The Fall address similar absurdist themes as “The Guest.” On this note, Camus’s work also considers the effects of colonialism on colonized peoples, and several literary greats have written novels where his influence is clear. J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians is similar to “The Guest,” as the protagonists in both works navigate the ethical difficulty of political violence during a colonial regime. Similarly, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart explores how colonialism can erode even the most ancient of traditions and destroy the potential for sympathy or camaraderie. Like “The Guest,” Things Fall Apart centers the many ethical dilemmas colonial rule puts people in, which often force them to sacrifice either their lives or their honor.