Driss’s “necessity and way of survival” ethic

Driss’s “necessity and way of survival” ethic is his attempt to make deprivation, religious allegiance, and personal choice fit a single rule: what he takes from people he sees as unbelievers can be recast as survival rather than theft. The code gives him a language for imagining himself hard and self-sufficient, but his memories of the Bloodworths’ generosity trouble its clean division between believer and unbeliever. Its significance lies in that tension: necessity is both a material condition and a story Driss tells himself about what he may do.

The material basis of the ethic

Driss’s reasoning grows out of a life marked by scarcity and constrained prospects. At the Bloodworths’ house, he earns three hundred euros a month, more than he has ever made. By October he has saved a thousand euros, yet he knows that the office contains much more cash. Roger Bloodworth routinely ties up banknotes and places them in the safe; Driss watches him and tries to learn the combination. He cannot yet remember it, and has not made a decision about what to do if he does. Instead, he frames the possibility of taking the money as necessity and a law of life. The distinction matters to him: the act is not presented as simple opportunism but as something his circumstances and outlook can authorize.

His employment also involves accommodation and concealment. He follows the household’s routines, waits until the doors are closed before going to his attic room, and moves through the corridor with a kitchen knife on his person. He privately treats his meekness as a performance while he studies the world around him and waits. The image he makes of himself is a man from Tafal’aalt moving alone through an unbelieving household, outwardly obedient but inwardly alert. Patience, in this account, is part of survival: he believes that keeping his head down may eventually give him room to act.

The wider economy gives that self-justification a social setting without proving that every act is inevitable. Men from Tafal’aalt sell trilobites, while traders and tourist shops connect their work to customers elsewhere. Anouar explains that the men of Tafal’aalt deal in trilobites, including Comura Tridents that can sell for hundreds of euros. At a quarry, a fossilized turtle slab is being raised by hand on a car jack for shipment to Norway as a coffee table. The contrast between arduous local work and expensive foreign use makes survival and value seem unevenly distributed. It helps illuminate the pressures surrounding Driss’s code, while leaving his choices his own.

A code challenged by hospitality

Driss’s difficulty is not only that the Bloodworths have money. They have taken him in and helped someone who was not one of their own. He cannot readily fit this generosity into his religious division between believers and unbelievers. He suspects that they may have thought of him as a son, but rejects the implication that a son must behave like a pet; sons, in his view, are strong, unpredictable, and free to go their own way. That image lets him preserve independence while acknowledging a bond he does not know how to repay.

The room Angela Bloodworth prepares for him makes the conflict concrete. Its thick mattress, pillows, carved ashwood lamp, books, slippers, bottle of water, and carefully kept cleanliness remain vivid in his memory. He understands the room as an expression of Angela’s precision and softness, and remembers it with amazement and regret. Such comfort does not fit the person he wants to be. He imagines the desert man as dry, hard, decisive, and free of obligation, not someone softened by pillows or by things made for comfort. Yet the remembered room survives as more than a luxury: it is evidence of care from people his code tells him to distrust.

The Bloodworths’ spontaneous help unsettles him precisely because he cannot dismiss it as a bargain. Their kindness leaves him feeling checkmated: he wants to be the one who understands and outmaneuvers them, not the person whose assumptions their actions defeat. At night he prowls outside and watches Roger in his study, then waits to try the locked kitchen door. Surveillance briefly gives Driss a sense of power over the people who have sheltered him. The locked door, however, also marks the distance between the generosity he remembers and the action he is contemplating.

Self-image, allegiance, and contradiction

Driss’s rule depends on a categorical account of who may be taken from. He imagines that God permits taking from those who deny Him, and treats the reasoning as straightforward. But his own experience resists that simplicity: the Bloodworths are unbelievers in his account, yet they have fed and housed him. His private question of whether he is beholden to them does not resolve the debt; it reveals that he recognizes both the help and his wish to escape obligation. The ethic claims to make the choice simple, while his recollections show the moral complication it cannot remove.

His account to Ismael carries the same tension. Driss says he was assessing his situation and presents his conduct through necessity. Ismael responds that the world is cruel and that his father says so; Driss agrees. The exchange connects his personal justification to a broader expectation of hardship, but it does not establish that cruelty excuses every response. Driss’s repeated appeal to necessity is powerful partly because it can name real constraint and partly because it protects him from seeing himself as indebted or morally compromised.

The code also shapes how Driss tells his own story. He enjoys telling stories and is pleased by the effect his tale has on Ismael; after returning to the fire, he gives necessity as his explanation. Storytelling turns experience into a case for the person he wants to be. The ethic is therefore not only a rule for conduct but a self-description: it recasts vulnerability as calculation, dependence as temporary strategy, and taking as survival. Its persuasiveness depends on the realities of poverty, but its contradictions remain visible in the kindness he cannot forget.

Beyond Driss’s own justification

The novel places his reasoning beside other responses to poverty and unequal exchange. David Henniger watches fossil diggers return from the mountain at dark and considers how the profits pass to middlemen and dealers, while families receive money that may keep them supplied with necessities for a few weeks. He also compares the arrangement with low-paid labor elsewhere and questions whether unequal pay by itself settles what counts as injustice. These reflections do not simply validate Driss’s code; they show how easily distant consumers can accept systems of labor and value while judging a poor man’s attempt to survive by a different standard.

Later, David decides to give two thousand euros to Anouar, reasoning that the money could help him if he is considering emigration to France because he has no other way to make a decent living. The gift offers a distinct answer to need: rather than claiming a right to take, David chooses to transfer money and hopes the gesture will matter. The contrast does not erase the economic conditions that give Driss’s ethic its force, nor does it settle the justice of the fossil trade. It does clarify the ethic’s limits. Necessity explains the pressure under which choices are made; it does not make the resulting choices identical, or eliminate the obligations that generosity creates.