A Distant Episode

Content Warning: The story and this guide discuss extreme violence, captivity, and enslavement. The guide also references imperialism.

“A Distant Episode” is a psychological horror story that uses foreshadowing, symbolism, imagery, and irony to create a mounting atmosphere of menace and to chart the professor’s psychological transformation. The story explores the themes of Orientalism and Western Naivete in the Face of Colonialism, “Primitiveness,” “Civilization,” and Psychology, and Fatalism and Free Will. As with many of Paul Bowles’s works, the story concerns a Western traveler’s ill-fated adventures in a foreign land.

The first half of the story consists of the professor’s visit to the town of Aïn Tadouirt, a fictional Algerian town toward the country’s interior. From the outset, the locals’ reactions to the professor characterize him as slightly naive and out of his depth. Although he can speak the language of the region, having taken “four years” to learn Algerian Arabic, the locals do not treat him with friendliness or regard. The bus driver who talks with him at the beginning of the story treats the professor with a “scornful” attitude.