Semansky is an instructor of English literature and composition who writes about literature and culture for various publications. In this essay, Semansky considers the narrator's self-delusion in Bowles's story.

In his study of the West's representation of Arab culture, Edward Said writes that Orientalism "is an ideology born of the colonizers' desire to know their subjects to better control them." Although Said is referring to the way in which historians have represented the Orient, his characterization also applies to the ways in which fiction writers represent it. Said argues that Westerners have depicted Arab cultures as dishonest and irrational and that their writing about the Orient is a form of political propaganda of which the writers themselves are not even aware. Said says, "This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners." In "The Eye...