Forgetting Oneself

Vanish: stare at the dot...see how easy it is to forget what is real??In the novel The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles, three Americans travel to Africa to find some clarity – a clarity that is never found. In this compelling (and disturbing) novel, Bowles tells yet another story where the adventure-seeking travelers lose themselves in a foreign place.

Kit, one of the protagonists in the novel, at first seems to be so civilized that the idea of her ‘fitting in’ in Africa is almost comical. By the end, Bowles portrays her as a blood-sucking-sex-slave who could never again be part of the civilized world. It seems as if the environment of Africa has a heavy impact on the changing morality and behavior of the travelers. As they immerse themselves further and further into Africa, they seem to only lose clarity, and maybe sanity too. To avoid simply summarizing the novel, I am going to focus on the actions of the travelers that I found to be the most appalling.

Both Kit and her husband Port cheat on each other while in Africa. It is difficult to understand why they do not just sleep with each other, but it seems as if the only thing keeping them apart is a lack of understanding, a lack of communication, and maybe then, just boredom. They only bring along their friend, Tunner, because they both subconsciously enjoy the sexual tension and threat that he poses – it excites them. Ultimately it is boredom that brings them to Africa in the first place. Once there, they all allow their desires to take over and their moral codes seem to vanish. Tunner gets Kit drunk and they have sex on a train. Port leaves his hotel room in the middle of the night and sleeps with a whore. Their efforts to take care of each other later in the book are just as pathetic as their attempts to be loyal early on in their trip. For example, when Port comes down with Typhus, Kit locks him in a room and lets him die. She then runs away to another town and devotes her time to forgetting all her senses except the ones that awaken while she is having sex with Balqassam, a rich African with three other wives. Tunner stays and waits for Kit, but not out of love. He realizes he only has to wait for her because he cannot face their friends without her safe return. The whole novel is just so, for lack of better word, twisted. Altruism is virtually nonexistent by the end of the novel, and each of the characters seem to be messed up in the head.

It seems to be a reoccurring theme in many of the works we have read thus far – The Sun Also Rises, Heart of Darkness, and The Evening of the Holiday- that when people become entangled in travel, there is often a decrease in their morality. In many cases I believe that simply the fact they are traveling can impact this behavior, just as much as the actual characteristics of their new environment. In other words I believe there is something about traveling (in general) can make a person behave in ways that are not typical of them. Maybe it is because we feel less bound to act properly because we are not home; perhaps we can more easily separate ourselves from our experiences because we are fooled into believing they will have no lasting impact on our reputation or on ourselves. But as Bowles illustrates, traveling can have implications even greater than reputation or self-image; sometimes it can become a matter of life or death.