The desert also projects an apocalyptic vision in the struggle between the West and the East and the Sahara becomes in fact a Conradian Heart of Darkness, an Eliotian Waste Land, and a Sartrean No Exit. The boundless desert acts here as a metaphor and the journey symbolizes one's own journey into the depth of his/her soul. The Sheltering Sky is an encounter with the Sahara, not only the physical one but the desert of moral nihilism into which one may wander blindly. His fiction mostly focuses on American expatriates travelling in exotic locations. Bowles is an American writer and a composer who is undoubtedly the most arresting example of cross-cultural influence concerning a Western author and the Middle East and North Africa. This paper attempts to show that an ecocritical reading of Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (1949) helps one in better understanding of this novel of post-colonial alienation and existential despair. Landscapes are not simply something objective and unchallenged out there but the work of the mind made by the strata of memory.
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