What the Sheltering Sky Shelters?

A Deconstructive Reading of The Sheltering Sky

It appears that Kit could not bear the harms that her suffers bring to her anymore. Eventually, it shatters her and causes her disappearance. “The Sahara’s a small place, really, when you come right down to it. People just don’t disappear there” (Bowles 312). However, at the end of The Sheltering Sky, Kit just disappears into the crowd. She escapes from people, civilization, and the past after all those horrors happened to her. We don’t know where she goes and why she disappears. Probably, only the sheltering sky knows the answer. After all, the sky “shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above” (Bowles 306). However, all the horrors happened to our characters make the sheltering sky seem like an ideal existence that helps these suffering people escape from the reality. Does the sheltering sky do as what Port says? What it really shelters? Probably, only itself knows.
The Sheltering Sky first appears when Port tries to open himself to Kit. The darkness or the emptiness of the night sky arouses something deep in his heart. Perhaps, the emptiness of the desert and the sky makes Port feel a sense of belonging and security. He takes Kit, who just follows his steps and has no interesting in the desert, and their friend Tunner, come to the foreign land. The first time that Port reveals his mind, his solitude and the emptiness to Kit happens when they ride to the rocks and watch the sunset. He says: “the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind” (Bowles 94). But what is behind the sky? It may be like what Port says, “Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night” (Bowles 94). If there is just the absolute night, why we need it to protect? What the sheltering sky shelters? Whether it protects them from what’s behind or protects something behind from them? There are many possibilities. But to Port, the sky seems like a shelter, protecting the people beneath from the things that they are afraid of and providing them security.     
Most of the time, it is the night sky that shows in the book. Under the sky, it is the unfathomable emptiness of the desert, the unknown darkness, as well as the emptiness of the people here. The darkness and the incomprehension of the foreign land attract and arouse people’s deepest desires and reflections, but also make them fear to some extent. You do not know what will happen, just like Port could never predict his death. Perhaps, the sky has already known everyone’s fate. After all, it shelters and protects creatures beneath. And sometimes, protecting one may lead to hurting another that threatens that. As the traveler, Port and Kit should have predicted their fates because of what they’ve done in the land that they do not belong to, such as Port’s dark secret with those women. Probably, he knows it all the time. As what he had said, “death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life … Yet everything happened only a certain numbers of times, and a very small number, really … And yet it all seems limitless” (Bowles 232). So, when the death comes, everything becomes clearer than before. At the last minute of his life, he sees an image. It seems that he finally sees what is behind the sky, “a black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose” (Bowles 229). The sheltering sky that he loves provides him last repose.  
After Port died, Kit runs and gets lost in the desert, alone. “The certainty gave her an unexpected sense of power: instead of feeling the omens, she now would make them, be them herself” (Bowles 262-263). She is her own person now, only herself or the sky could protect her. The image of the sky shows more frequently in the late part of this book. Kit thinks that she now is omens herself, but she has never thought that it is herself that pushes her to the edge of another cliff, and then crashes her. Perhaps, only the sky can protect her, as Port once told her, “the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above” (Bowles 306). So, after escaping from Belqassim and saved by Amar, after all the suffers, on her way back to the beginning of their story, “[u]nblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her. At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed” (Bowles 306). She finds some of her senses back: “the desert’s a big place, but nothing really ever gets lost there” (Bowles 310). Is it true that nothing ever gets lost? Probably. Maybe under the shelter of the sky, nothing can get lost. However, it seems that Kit losses everything. After these suffers, taking back to the first place that their story begins by the Transafricaine appears to shatter her last sanity. Kit disappears and gets lost in the desert, again. Does the sky really shelter her from the horror? At some moments, it does. But it’s hard to tell. Perhaps, somewhere deep in the desert, it provides Kit a shelter, in which she can fix the emptiness, feel safer, and gain the sense of power back.   
Looking at all the things that happened to Port and Kit, it seems that the sheltering sky could not protect them from the horror, but it may also be the opposite. At the end of his life, Port follows the black star, piercing the sheltering sky and reaching out the repose. He reposed on the territory that he loved. Whereas Kit, escapes from everything, running to somewhere deep in the Sahara and under the sheltering sky, in which we hope that she could live with the joy of being that she finally regained after a long time. Perhaps, it’s the best that the sheltering sky could give them. Whether the sheltering sky shelters them from what’s behind or protects the land or something from them? What the sheltering sky truly shelters? It’s hard to tell. Maybe both. Eventually, the sheltering sky does its job, filling their emptiness, providing them a shelter, and protecting the land it covers.  





References:
Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. Ecco, 2000.

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