The Minotaur Summary and Analysis

Men from time to time need to retreat to areas which are silent in order to collect their thoughts and better understand the world. This silence is best found in big cities, in which one can simultaneously be in the presence of others and yet be lost in the crowd. European cities, however, are too imbued with their violent and eventful histories to provide this silence. Cities can even be too filled with poetry to provide the proper silence for thought. The city of Oran, then, is ideal, as it is a kind of city without soul or poetry to distract the thinker.

Oran is a mixture of many surrounding cultures, having no distinctive culture of its own. It is a city built primarily around trade and as such is filled with all varieties of shops and trading houses...