Necessity for Survival and Moral Self-Justification

Necessity for Survival and Moral Self-Justification is the ethical framework Driss constructs to make taking from others seem like survival rather than wrongdoing. It begins in economic calculation and resentment, but hardens into a rule that licenses deception and violence. The narrative tests that rule against the unexpected kindness of Roger Bloodworth and Angela Bloodworth, then shows Driss using it to explain his actions to himself and to Ismael.

Poverty, Observation, and the Logic of Taking

While working for Roger Bloodworth and Angela Bloodworth, Driss earns three hundred euros a month, more money than he has ever made. By October he has saved a thousand euros, yet he knows the household safe contains much more: Roger keeps substantial sums of cash in the office, partly to avoid taxes. Driss watches him bind the banknotes with rubber bands and secure them in the safe, but cannot memorize the combination. He interprets the household’s cash practices as evidence that its owners, too, are sly, and uses that perceived hypocrisy to blur the line between their conduct and his own contemplated theft.

His imagined alternative is Paris: he has to weigh leaving for the city against waiting to see what the English employers might do for him. He does not yet know what he will do with the money or how he might obtain it. Instead, he studies the safe and the household’s routines, telling himself that once he learns the combination he will have to decide carefully. The delay matters: in his account, patience and observation make taking seem less like an impulsive choice and more like an eventual answer to circumstances.

The Desert-Man Ideal and Its Contradictions

Driss’s self-justification is also an attempt to define the person he wants to become. He wants to be hard, decisive, and free of obligations, imagining a desert man who takes from those he regards as unbelievers because God permits it. In this ideal, need becomes permission, and the distinction between taking and theft is dismissed before the act is committed. His conviction that the logic is simple reveals how thoroughly he has made the rule serve his wishes.

Yet the comfort of the Bloodworths’ home unsettles this austere identity. Driss remembers the carefully prepared room Angela made for him: a thick mattress, pillows, books, an ashwood lamp, water, slippers, dried lavender, and clean linen. He is grateful for its care and regrets that he has never found such a room again, but insists that softness and comfort do not suit the man he intends to be. The tension is not simply between poverty and luxury. He has received hospitality from people he classifies as outsiders, and their kindness threatens the moral separation on which his permission to take depends.

That generosity troubles him more than their wealth. Roger Bloodworth and Angela Bloodworth helped someone who was not one of their own without first making the choice into a calculation. Driss cannot reconcile this with his own rule that he would place a believer before an unbeliever. Their spontaneous care reverses the position he expected to occupy: instead of outmaneuvering them, he feels morally checkmated. He responds by watching the house from outside at night, turning secret observation into a way to recover a sense of power.

Patience, Guile, and the Safe

When Driss cannot recall the safe’s combination, he treats the obstacle as a tactical problem. He tells himself that the weak must use ruses and wait until circumstances make one effective. His routine reinforces the performance: he goes to his attic room after the doors are shut, keeps out of the guests’ way, and presents himself as meek and obedient while privately observing how the household works. He has tended the garden faithfully for four months, and when Roger tells him that he will be away in England and asks Driss to look after Angela, Driss takes the request as recognition of his patience. Roger also says they can discuss helping him go to Paris when he returns.

That prospect does not displace Driss’s need for money. Later, when Angela asks why he needs to understand the safe, he admits that he needs the money inside it. His earlier affection for her does not prevent him from recasting her as an obstacle: in his perception, the woman he has grown fond of becomes an unbeliever who will not give him what he wants. He uses a threat to make her reveal the combination, takes the cash, and then realizes he has no real plan for what to do next. The gap between his carefully cultivated patience and his lack of an escape plan exposes the limits of his claim that he is acting according to a rational law of survival.

Violence Reframed as Necessity

After Angela’s death, Driss experiences a cool elation and calmly cleans and returns the knife. The quiet house and the sound of birds remain around him, while his attention narrows to his own body and the immediate aftermath. An internal objection that he cannot do this is answered by his assurance that he can. The scene makes the function of self-justification stark: it does not remove his awareness of a moral boundary; it enables him to overrule that awareness and continue.

Driss leaves with cash and clothes and returns to the gas station near San Martín, where he persuades a young Moroccan family travelling to Paris to give him a place in their car in exchange for paying their fuel. His movement toward the city follows the ambition he had considered while employed, but the journey now depends on the money taken from the Bloodworth household and on another calculated appeal to strangers. Necessity has become both explanation and method: it justifies taking, while guile helps him move toward the future he desires.

The Story Driss Tells Ismael

Later, beside a fire among the fossils, Driss recounts his actions to Ismael. He presents himself as cold and capable, and reduces the governing principle to necessity. The tale has an immediate purpose: Driss senses that Ismael admires him more than before, and regards the boy as more likely to follow his lead in the unspecified work he has in mind. His offer to share a fig accompanies a story that makes calculated violence seem like proof of competence.

The concept therefore operates on two levels. It is Driss’s private defense against the knowledge that his choices have consequences, and it is a persuasive performance designed to shape Ismael’s view of him. But the account also preserves the contradictions that weaken Driss’s defense: the people he casts as outsiders had helped him, his promised opportunity to discuss Paris has not yet arrived, and his supposed plan gives way to improvisation once he has the money. By calling wrongdoing necessity, he can present desire as compulsion; the narrative nevertheless shows the choices, calculations, and reversals within that claim.