Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Summary
Ferdinand Bardamu, a poor Parisian medical student, enlists on impulse in the First World War and finds nothing in the trenches but noise, terror, and officers eager to spend soldiers' lives on nothing in particular. Discharged as unfit, he drifts to French colonial Africa to manage a remote trading post, catches fever, and flees toward the coast as little more than a slave aboard a galley ship. In New York he works briefly before taking a job on Henry Ford's assembly line in Detroit, where the same men who praise progress treat him as replaceable machinery. Back in France he finishes his medical training and opens a failing practice in the poor Paris suburb of La Garenne Rancy, tending patients he mostly despises and envies in turn. His friend Léon Robinson keeps reappearing throughout the book, blinded after a botched murder attempt and eventually engaged to a woman named Madelon, who shoots him dead during a carnival outing near the novel's close. Bardamu, standing over the body, can only reflect that Robinson never managed to find an idea bigger than death.
Céline writes in a spoken, headlong French built from slang and obscenity rather than the polished sentences French literary fiction usually reached for, and the standard translations carry that same rough momentum into English. The book reads fast and bitterly funny in patches, its disgust turned as often on Bardamu himself as on anyone he meets, which is what keeps the whole performance from curdling into simple misanthropy. Readers still argue over whether its nihilism is a diagnosis of the century or a pose Céline never fully earned.
Céline, himself a doctor who had served and been wounded in the First World War, drew directly on his own postings in colonial Cameroon and a research trip to a Ford plant in Michigan before writing the novel in the early 1930s under a pen name taken from his grandmother, Céline, rather than his birth name, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches.
Historical Context & Significance
Denoël et Steele published the novel in October 1932, and it became the clear favorite for that year's Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize; the jury instead gave the award to Guy Mazeline's now largely forgotten Les Loups, a decision French critics still argue over. The loss did the book no commercial harm, and the controversy helped push sales past fifty thousand copies within two months. Céline did win a real prize that same year, the Prix Renaudot, founded in 1926 by journalists as a corrective to the Goncourt's choices, and awarded to his novel the same day the Goncourt went elsewhere.
Reviews split hard at the time: one critic in Les Nouvelles littéraires praised its extraordinary language, while Le Populaire de Paris dismissed the whole book as vulgarity and obscenity. Céline's later reputation curdled badly. Beginning in 1937 he published antisemitic pamphlets, collaborated with the Vichy regime during the German occupation, and fled France in 1944 for Germany and then Denmark, where he spent a year and a half in prison, and lived in exile until an amnesty let him return to France in 1951. That record has never separated cleanly from this novel's standing, even as critics from Le Monde to The Guardian continue to rank it among the essential novels of the twentieth century.