Ambivalence and Ambiguity of the Short Story in Albert Camus's ‘L'Hôte’ and Mohammed Dib's ‘La Fin’

This chapter analyzes Albert Camus' ‘L'Hôte’ (1957) and Mohammed Dib's ‘La Fin’ (1966). It is argues that while both stories seem to slide effortlessly between ambiguity and ambivalence, it is, ultimately, only Camus'story that is able to sustain ambivalence to the very end. It shows how this Rubicon between ambiguity and ambivalence is crossed by Camus' story, and how Dib, instead, uses ambiguity, not to sit precariously if dextrously on the fence as Camus and his story can be seen to do, but to gesture towards the ‘responsibility’ of literature in which the writer too has a political and social role to play that goes well beyond simply guaranteeing the validity, plausibility, and ‘representativity’ of the characters depicted.