“The Sudden Guest”: A Critical Analysis

Christopher la Farge's novel, The Sudden Guest, is the story of a woman's experiences during two hurricanes on the New England coast and of their effect on her. The author describes her change from a proud, arrogant and egocentric woman with no conscious doubts about herself or her way of life to a woman softened by suffering and beginning awareness of self-doubting, conflicts, and the need for change in herself and her way of life.

Against the background of the twenty-four hours of the second hurricane in 1944, Carrel Leckton reviews some of her life and finds herself unable to stem the flow of recollections of events in the first hurricane in 1938. Throughout the story the external storms and the storms within Carrel become merged as she begins more open battle between her good and guilty conscience. Constructive forces within her—her honesty, intelligence, and essential integrity—produce and help her to awareness of the uneasiness and discomfort characterized by Erich Fromm as “the humanistic guilty conscience.” Carrel Leckton might never have started on the road to change without the therapeutic life experiences of the two hurricanes.

The story begins with her reactions to the radio announcement of imminent external danger from the impending second hurricane. Carrel tries to dismiss this reality by minimizing the reports. She cannot, however, so easily dismiss the fact that she feels depressed and is somewhat short of breath. Her honesty forces her to acknowledge that the barometric pressure is too low to account for her discomfort. She tries to relieve her psychic and physical uneasiness by focusing on disagreeable external events and piling up feelings of rage, righteous indignation, and of being abused. These feelings temporarily alleviate her discomfort and her in-decisiveness about making preparations in the house to withstand the storm outside. In particular, indecisiveness is intolerable to Carrel, for it endangers her glorification of herself as the comple