Journey to the End of the Night

• 1. Introduction

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  Journey to the End of the Night arrived in October 1932 as the first novel by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and within two months it had sold fifty thousand copies. That surge was fueled, in part, by a scandal: the novel had been the favourite for the Prix Goncourt, but when the prize went to Guy Mazeline's Les Loups instead, the resulting public outrage sent readers straight to Celine's book. The Prix Renaudot was eventually awarded to the novel that same year, as a kind of corrective verdict from a second jury.

  The book follows Ferdinand Bardamu, a young Parisian medical student, across the trenches of World War One, into the jungle interior of colonial Africa, through the streets of New York, onto the assembly line at Ford Motor Company in Detroit, and finally back to a bleak fictional suburb of Paris where he practices medicine among the very poor. His companion, Léon Robinson, appears and reappears across each of these landscapes like a dark mirror. By 1999, Le Monde would rank the novel sixth on its list of the hundred greatest novels of the twentieth century, and in 2003 it appeared on The Guardian's list of the hundred greatest novels of all time.

  What made the book so polarising in 1932, and so enduring afterward? The answer lies in the language Celine invented, the themes he pressed without apology, and the way one darkly funny novel managed to encompass war, colonial exploitation, industrial labor, poverty, and death under a single title drawn from an old soldier's song.

• 2. A Language from the Streets

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  Celine began writing the novel in 1929, while working as a doctor at a public clinic in Clichy, a working-class suburb of Paris. The French he put on the page was unlike anything in the literary tradition he was entering. He built a new literary register from the spoken French of the working class, layering in medical and nautical jargon, neologisms, obscenities, and the specialised slang of soldiers, sailors, and the criminal underworld.

  When the novel appeared, a critic for Les Nouvelles litteraires praised its extraordinary language, calling it the height of the natural and the artificial. The critic for Le Populaire de Paris dismissed the same language as mere vulgarity and obscenity. Both responses captured something real: the prose was genuinely new, and it refused to be neutral about what it described.

  The narrator's voice, as the scholar Merlin Thomas observed, is clinical and detached, the voice of an experienced doctor looking at the world through the eyes of his younger self. That clinical tone is threaded through with sardonic commentary and black humour, arising from the spectacle of characters trying and failing to control their circumstances. As the biographer Patrick McCarthy summarised it: everything they do is ridiculous.

  Periodically the clinical detachment breaks down entirely. Delirium intrudes, sometimes triggered by fever or psychological stress, sometimes for no apparent reason. The critic Vitoux described this second state as one that distances dull, prosaic reality, and that makes the writer incomparably clear-sighted in the very depths of his misery.

• 3. The Title's Hidden Source

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  The title of the novel traces back to 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: Notre vie est un voyage / Dans l'Hiver et dans la Nuit / Nous cherchons notre passage / Dans le Ciel ou rien ne luit. In English: Our life is a journey / Through Winter and Night; / We look for our way / In a sky without light.

  The attribution contains a quiet historical error. The Swiss Guards were abolished in France in 1792, not 1793. The text actually comes from the 1792 poem Die Nachtreise. The poem was later set to music by various composers and became associated with the French invasion of Russia, in which some Swiss regiments were deployed.

  What the epigraph establishes, whatever its provenance, is the emotional key of the entire novel: a journey without destination, through conditions without comfort, under a sky that offers no guidance.

• 4. War and the Logic of Desertion

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  Ferdinand Bardamu enlists voluntarily on the outbreak of World War One, in what the novel describes as a fit of enthusiasm. His conversion is almost immediate. During his first engagement he decides the war makes no sense and that he needs to clear out.

  On a nighttime reconnaissance mission he meets Léon Robinson, a French reservist who wants to be captured by the Germans so he can sit out the war in a prisoner of war camp. The two men make their way to a French town looking for Germans to surrender to. There are none. They part ways.

  Bardamu is wounded, receives the medaille militaire, and takes convalescent leave in Paris. There he meets Lola, an American volunteer nurse. At an amusement park, at the shooting gallery, he suffers a nervous breakdown. He tells her he rejects the war because he has no desire to die for nothing. She tells him he is a coward and leaves.

  He then becomes involved with Musyne, a violinist, who soon leaves him for a series of rich Argentinians who have profited from the war. He is transferred to a hospital specialising in electrical therapy and patriotic psychiatry, and eventually discharged as psychologically unfit for service.

  The scholar Merlin Thomas described Celine's vision of war as an implacable force that turns the ordinary individual into an animal intent only on survival. Bardamu's own reading is more direct: war is a means for the rich to cull the poor. The poor are the ones who always suffer most.

• 5. Africa, Detroit, and the Colonial Machine

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  Bardamu travels to French colonial Africa and is placed in charge of a trading post in the jungle interior. What he finds is a dilapidated hut. He also finds Robinson, who has arrived ahead of him. Robinson tells him that the company cheats its employees and the natives, so cheating the company in return is simply sensible. Robinson slips away in the night.

  After a few weeks Bardamu catches a fever and, in his delirium, burns the trading post down. He flees toward the coast to avoid punishment for defrauding the company. Natives carry him, still delirious, to a Spanish colony, where a priest sells him to a ship owner as a galley slave.

  The ship takes him to New York. Placed in quarantine until his fever subsides, Bardamu talks his way into a job with the quarantine authority. He tracks down Lola, now wealthy and eager to be rid of him. She gives him a hundred dollars. He travels to Detroit and finds work on the assembly line at Ford Motor Company, which the novel presents as exhausting and dehumanising.

  In Detroit he falls in love with Molly, a prostitute who wants him to stay. He confesses his compulsion to escape every situation he finds himself in. He encounters Robinson again and is surprised to find that Robinson has also failed to make anything of himself in America. Bardamu decides to return to France and complete his medical training.

  Bardamu's admiration for Molly goes beyond her physical beauty to her simple generosity. And when his colleague Alcide in Africa volunteered for another stint in colonial service in order to pay for the education of his orphaned niece, Bardamu thought him foolish but admired the intention. These are two of the novel's rare instances of uncomplicated human kindness.

• 6. Paris, Robinson, and the End

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  Back in Paris, Bardamu opens a medical practice in the fictional suburb of La Garenne-Rancy. Most of his patients are too poor to pay him. He mainly handles the consequences of botched abortions and takes on hopeless cases that other doctors refuse.

  His patients include a couple named the Henrouilles, whose elderly mother lives in a shed behind their house. They want her committed to an asylum but Bardamu refuses to certify her. They hire Robinson to kill her. The booby trap Robinson constructs explodes in his own face and blinds him.

  To suppress the scandal, the Henrouilles arrange for Robinson and the old woman to manage a mummy exhibit in the crypt of a church in Toulouse. The exhibit becomes profitable under her management. Robinson, as his eyesight slowly returns, becomes engaged to Madelon, a woman who sells candles at the church and has been caring for him. The two plan to take over the exhibit by murdering the old woman. Robinson pushes her down the steep staircase to the crypt and kills her.

  Bardamu meanwhile has found a position at a lunatic asylum on the outskirts of Paris. The director, Dr. Baryton, begins taking English lessons from him. Affected by the Elizabethan poets and the tragic history of Monmouth the pretender, Baryton abandons psychiatry entirely and departs for England, leaving Bardamu in charge.

  When Robinson tracks Bardamu down at the asylum, he has left Madelon behind. He tells Bardamu he doesn't want her and he doesn't want her love. Madelon eventually finds him there and threatens to go to the police unless he marries her. A double date at a carnival is arranged to reconcile them. In the taxi back, Robinson tells Madelon he doesn't want to be with her because love disgusts him. During the violent argument that follows, she shoots him. He dies. Bardamu reflects that he has not yet found an idea bigger than death, and Madelon is never caught.

• 7. Hatred, Survival, and a Sliver of Hope

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  Patrick McCarthy, Celine's biographer, identified hatred as the novel's central organising force. The Celinian man suffers from what McCarthy called an original sin of malicious hatred, with no God available to offer redemption. Hatred gives the characters a concrete, if illusory, reason for their unhappiness. Its defining characteristic is that it is gratuitous: one does not hate because of harm done; one hates because one has to.

  Merlin Thomas traced a second line of argument running alongside the hatred: the possibility of defiance. Though the poor and weak cannot alter their fate, Thomas argued, they can choose how to face it. If you are weak, then you will derive strength from stripping those you fear of all the prestige they pretend to possess. Defiance, Thomas concluded, is an element of hope and personal salvation.

  McCarthy extended this to the question of death itself. The Celinian man has some control over how he meets his end. He need not be arbitrarily slaughtered in battle, and he need not blind himself with distractions. He can choose to face death, a more painful but more dignified process.

  The novel holds these positions together without resolving them: hatred as the engine of misery, defiance as the only available dignity, and rare acts of kindness, like Alcide's sacrifice for his orphaned niece or Molly's uncomplicated generosity, as the evidence that Celine had not entirely abandoned the human world he was depicting. Bardamu's final reflection, that he has not yet found an idea bigger than death, keeps the novel from closing on any comfort. The question it plants stays open long after Robinson is buried and Madelon has vanished into the night.