Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the End of the Night, first novel, published in French in 1932, written by misanthropic French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The novel, though controversial, was widely admired and was first published in English in 1934.

Often described by critics as a picaresque novel and also as semi-autobiographical, Journey to the End of the Night tells the story of a tormented man’s quest for meaning in a bleak world without beauty or morality. It is narrated in colloquial and often vulgar language sprinkled with slang by its protagonist, Ferdinand Bardamu. As the book begins, Bardamu is a medical student in Paris at the beginning of World War I. Struck with patriotism, he joins the French army and soon finds himself on the front lines. Finding his circumstances to be horrifying and absurd, he seeks a way out and joins forces with Léon Robinson, a fellow soldier equally eager to escape. Bardamu, however, is wounded in battle, awarded a medal, and sent back to Paris for medical treatment. There he falls into a relationship with an American volunteer nurse, Lola, who leaves him upon grasping that he does not intend to return to fighting. This triggers a mental health collapse, and after extensive treatment he is declared unfit for duty and discharged.

Bardamu then travels to French West Africa to take charge of a trading post in the interior. The trading post proves to be only a badly maintained hut, and the man Bardamu is replacing turns out to be Robinson. After some time, Bardamu falls ill and, delirious with fever, burns down the hut and flees to the coast. Pressed into service as an oarsman on a ship, he thus journeys to America, arriving still feverish to New York City, where he is quarantined.

In New York City, Bardamu gets a job with the port authorities. Sent on an errand to an office in the city, he seeks out and finds Lola, who has become wealthy and is still uninterested in Bardamu. She gives him money to travel to Detroit, where he works on an assembly line for the Ford Motor Company. Here he both falls in love with a prostitute, Molly, and runs into Robinson, who is destitute. Though Molly wants to make a life with him, Bardamu decides to return to France and finish his medical training.

Once he becomes a doctor, Bardamu opens a practice in a bleak and impoverished suburb. A couple asks him to institutionalize the husband’s mother, but he refuses. They then hire Robinson to kill her, but his attempt results only in blinding him. The old lady and Robinson are sent to Toulouse to manage a mummy exhibit, which becomes a success. Robinson gets engaged to his nurse, Madelon, and then he kills the old lady in order to take over the exhibit. Meanwhile, Bardamu ends up running a psychiatric hospital in Paris. Robinson tires of his life with Madelon and flees to Paris, where Bardamu employs him, but Madelon finds him and, when he refuses her, kills him, leaving Bardamu to ponder the meaninglessness of life.

Journey to the End of the Night led to its author being lauded as a great innovator in French literature when it was published. In part, this was because of the disconnected and fervid style of Céline’s prose, which reflects the nihilistic thesis of the story. The novel’s influence can be seen in the works of such authors as Henry Miller, Joseph Heller, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac. After Journey to the End of the Night, Céline’s work became more and more explicitly antisemitic and his misanthropy became more vicious, but his first novel remains a significant work of literature.