Short answers, pulled from the story.
Journey to the End of the Night follows Ferdinand Bardamu, a young Parisian medical student, through World War One, colonial Africa, the United States, and the poor suburbs of Paris where he works as a doctor. The novel is a semi-autobiographical work by Louis-Ferdinand Celine that explores themes of war, colonial exploitation, poverty, hatred, and survival.
Journey to the End of the Night was published in October 1932 by the Paris publisher Denoël et Steele. It was Celine's first novel, which he completed in late 1931 after beginning work on it in 1929.
Journey to the End of the Night did not win the Prix Goncourt in 1932; that prize went to Guy Mazeline's Les Loups. The resulting scandal boosted sales of Celine's novel, which sold fifty thousand copies in the two months following the controversy. The novel was instead awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1932.
The title comes from the first stanza of the Beresinalied, a song Celine attributed to the Swiss Guards of 1793. The French translation of that stanza serves as the book's epigraph and translates as: Our life is a journey / Through Winter and Night; / We look for our way / In a sky without light. The text actually derives from the 1792 poem Die Nachtreise, and was later associated with the French invasion of Russia.
Celine built a new literary language from the spoken French of the working class, combined with medical and nautical jargon, neologisms, obscenities, and the slang of soldiers, sailors, and the criminal underworld. The novel's narrative voice is clinical and detached, periodically giving way to hallucinatory delirium. A 1932 critic for Les Nouvelles litteraires praised its extraordinary language as the height of the natural and the artificial.
In 1999 Le Monde ranked Journey to the End of the Night sixth on its list of the hundred greatest novels of the twentieth century. In 2003 the novel appeared on The Guardian's list of the hundred greatest novels of all time. It is now widely considered one of the great works of European literature.