English 015 - Americans Abroad
3E: Bowles
True Traveler
Category: 3E: Bowles | Karen Tang
In Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, only Kit develops into a true traveler. A true traveler, according to Port, belongs “no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another” (p.14). Port and the Lyles never become...
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Posted by ktang on December 02, 2003 at 02:00 PM
What do you want here?
Category: 3E: Bowles | Simon Parsons
In Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, the leitmotifs prostitution and especially blindness hold particular importance as they relate to the traveler. The blurring of sight intrigues Kit and Port as it isolates them from that which they seek to forget: for Port, the “mechanized age” (14) associated with WWII, for...
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Posted by on November 30, 2003 at 06:03 PM
Only Death Can Save A Meaningless Life
Category: 3E: Bowles | Tom Lakin
Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky is a book ripe with existentialist thought. The world presented by Bowles in the novel is bleak and meaningless, as are the lives of the two main characters, Port and Kit. Their lives are completely devoid of any meaning and definition, comprised only of unchanging...
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Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 04:56 PM
Pursuit of Hedonism
Category: 3E: Bowles | Andrew Plowman
“[Kit] watched fascinated while two flies made their brief, frantic love…” (pp.240). Kit finds freedom in sex, which produces a way to escape the constant fear that haunts her travels: the man with “the most hideous human face she had ever seen,” the yellow louse on her neck, the...
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Posted by aplowman on November 25, 2003 at 03:51 PM
Personal Motivations
Category: 3E: Bowles | Matt Nickel
The American and European characters in The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles, are influenced by personal motivation. Each character has different personal motivations such as the desire for money, women, or fear of natives. These motivations influence the characters interactions with natives. The characters personal motivations stem from their behavior...
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Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 02:22 PM
A New Moon
Category: 3E: Bowles | Zac Milner
In Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, Kit attempts to completely alter her lifestyle after Port’s death. She consciously tries to let go of her unbreakable bond to Port, to lead a life in which there is no connection to her former husband. However, even after his death Port continues to...
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Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 02:21 PM
Arab Homes
Category: 3E: Bowles | Meaghan Tanguay
“[Port] did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next…” (p.13-14). As...
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Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 02:19 PM
Deviant Behavior Within the Lyles
Category: 3E: Bowles | Bryan Ciborowski
“She’s an hysterical old hag, and the boy ----! He’s a criminal degenerate if I ever saw one. He gives me the creeps” (pg. 65). From the first time the reader meets the Lyles in The Sheltering Sky, they display deviant behavior. The Lyles’s sinister conduct is strikingly more...
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Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 02:01 PM
Control Abroad
Category: 3E: Bowles | Hope Stockton
According to Paul Bowles, a traveler is distinguished from a tourist both in the speed of the travel and also in his or her view of civilization (Bowles, 14). However, within The Sheltering Sky, Bowles also suggests that there is something else crucial to being a traveler, something much more...
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Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 01:59 PM
Europe in the Desert
Category: 3E: Bowles | Kelsey Abbruzzese
Europe in the Desert “The young Englishman who went to Messad, he was like you,” an Arab tells Port in The Sheltering Sky. “Pretending always to be innocent” (Bowles 143). Though Port and Kit commit deviant sexual behavior in the novel as the Englishman, Eric Lyle, and his mother do,...
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Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 01:24 PM
Sex in the Sahara
Category: 3E: Bowles | Meg Gray
From cover to cover, The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles is fixated on sex. The characters are always thinking about it, having it, or wishing they were closer to it. Surprisingly enough, the two main characters, Port and Kit Moresby, never actual have sex with each other. Kit and Port’s...
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Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 01:04 PM
Life and Death Under The Sheltering Sky
Category: 3E: Bowles | Diana Heald
Death is an ever-present factor in Kit and Port’s lives, sometimes a small, dark pinpoint in the distance, at other times overwhelmingly great and foreboding. The signs of death are everywhere: in the sickly children crawling on mounds of garbage, in the rotting, spoiled food served at every meal, in...
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Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 12:56 PM
Kit: A True Traveler
Category: 3E: Bowles | Eric Robinson
From the beginning of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, Port and Kit wish to escape from war-torn Europe and any of its influences that exist beyond the continent. In the opening pages of the work, the reader learns of Port’s fixation with being a traveler rather than merely a...
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Posted by on November 24, 2003 at 09:52 PM
Changes in the Sahara: Port's Descent into Hypocrisy
Category: 3E: Bowles | Thomas Buehrens
Port defines his journey into the Sahara as a way in which he may distance himself from the Western influence he loathes. Though his travels lead him physically farther from Western culture, Port is slowly driven to actually embody the qualities of the system he hates. The harder Port...
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Posted by on November 24, 2003 at 12:25 AM
Dwindling Time
Category: 3E: Bowles | Ross Stern
The concept of time controls Port’s and Kit’s actions and psyche throughout Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. Time not only has a superficial effect on their physical actions, such as traveling; it also controls Port’s and Kit’s views of life. Once Port, Kit’s sole connection to European culture, dies, Kit...
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Posted by on November 23, 2003 at 04:43 PM