Choices

The Guest is a short story of Albert Camus that has remained in my consciousness for years. The protagonist, Daru, is a French schoolteacher who lives in his “schoolhouse” on a remote hillside “almost like a monk.” The setting is during the Algerian War of Independence against France. One day Daru finds himself ordered by a French gendarme to keep an Arab murderer with him for the night before taking him to the police authorities the next morning.

Daru is not a shallow nationalist who will do anything that his country demands merely because he was born in that country. He believes in his own individual rights and moral duties more than in national obligations. What do patriotism and nationalism mean if they demand actions from you that go against your personal convictions? You become antinational. You can be labelled anything like ‘a terrorist’ or ‘an urban Naxal.’ You can be arrested and killed by your nation though you have done nothing wrong by your personal morality and convictions. Your office can be raided, properties confiscated, house bulldozed…

Daru’s sympathies are with neither his colonial government nor the murderous Arab prisoner. But he is not interested in doing the task assigned to him: leading a fellow human being to the brutal police. He leaves the prisoner unchained at night so that he can escape if he wants. But the prisoner doesn’t escape.

Daru takes the man to the police headquarters the next morning. But, on the way, he stops, hands over a packet of food to the prisoner and says, “Take it. There are dates, bread, and sugar. You can hold out for two days. Here are a thousand francs too.”

Daru tells him also how to reach “the administration and the police” if he chooses to. But that’s the choice of the prisoner. If he wants, he can surrender himself. If he chooses otherwise, he can escape.

Daru is acting in accordance with his own moral convictions. Daru, like his creator Camus, doesn’t approve of the French government’s oppression of the native Algerians. Camus also believed that one’s national obligations should not override one’s personal moral responsibility. By giving the Arab prisoner a choice over his fate, Daru is rejecting the imposition of duties on him by his nation. He is making a personal choice.

But he has to pay heavily for it. As a result of this choice, he becomes an enemy of his government. Ironically, he becomes an enemy of the Arab revolutionaries too. When he returns to his classroom later, he sees the inscription on the blackboard: “You handed over our brother. You will pay for this.”

How much liberty does an individual really have? Can you live without taking sides in any country? Is it necessary for you to be right or left or liberal? Is it necessary to accept a label and live with that? If you are not with us, you are against us?

Camus was not against the idea of national obligations, of course. He wouldn’t accept any national obligation that goes against a person’s individual conscience. One’s duty to humanity outweighs duty to the state. I find Camus appealing all the more to me as years go by. 

PS. A post I wrote 12 years ago on the same short story: Camus’ Predicament

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