A Distant Episode

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

From the story’s outset, the professor is portrayed as passive and slightly naive. Although he is presumably middle-aged and well-educated, there is something wide-eyed about him, and he seems to have a fetishized view of the country he is visiting. On the bus journey he reminisces about his first trip to the “warm country” 10 years prior and his “fairly firm friendship” with a local café owner (Paragraph 1), but the narrator then reveals that this supposed friend stopped writing to the professor after only a year. This establishes the professor’s basic relationship to the country: His interest in it is earnest but also slightly presumptuous, premised on a colonialist sense of privilege that the professor himself does not recognize. Consequently, the professor also fails to understand why the Algerians he encounters—from the “scornful” bus driver, to the gruff qaouaji, to Hassan Ramani himself—might resent him.

This central misperception renders the professor vulnerable, and even before the professor is led out of town by the qaouaji, he is portrayed in such a way as to suggest that he is out of his depth.