Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the End of the Night

By: Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) is the first novel of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This semi-autobiographical work describes antihero Ferdinand Bardamu.

Bardamu is involved with World War I, colonial Africa, and post–World War I United States (where he works for the Ford Motor Company), returning in the second half of the work to France, where he becomes a medical doctor and establishes a practice in a poor Paris suburb, the fictional La Garenne-Rancy. The novel also satirizes the medical profession and the vocation of scientific research. The disparate elements of the work are linked together by recurrent encounters with Léon Robinson, a hapless character whose experiences parallel, to some extent, those of Bardamu.

  

Céline's first novel is most remarkable perhaps for its style. Céline makes extensive use of ellipsis and hyperbole. He writes with the flow of natural speech patterns and writes vernacular, while also employing more erudite elements. This influenced French literature considerably. The novel enjoyed popular success and a fair amount of critical acclaim when it was published during October 1932. Albert Thibaudet, perhaps the greatest of the entre-deux-guerres critics, said that during January 1933 it was still a common topic of conversation at dinner parties in Paris.

  

A clue to understanding Céline's Voyage is the trauma he suffered during his experience of the Great War 1914–19.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.