Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) is the first novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
The novel won the Prix Renaudot in 1932 but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his innovative writing style based on working class speech, slang and neologisms.
The poem was later set to music by Friedrich Wilke,[5] and was associated with the French invasion of Russia, in which some Swiss regiments were deployed.)
Ferdinand Bardamu is a young Parisian medical student who, in a fit of enthusiasm, voluntarily enlists in the French army on the outbreak of World War One.
Bardamu travels to French colonial Africa where he is put in charge of a trading post in the jungle interior.
Natives from the nearby village carry Bardamu, who is still delirious, to a Spanish colony where a priest sells him to a ship owner as a galley slave.
He falls in love with a prostitute named Molly who wants him to settle down in America with her but he confesses his mania for escaping from whatever situation he is in.
Back in Paris, Bardamu completes his medical studies and starts a practice in the bleak (fictitious) suburb of La Garenne-Rancy.
The residents are mostly too poor to pay him and he mainly deals with the consequences of botched abortions and takes on hopeless cases which other doctors won't touch.
Robinson, whose eyesight is gradually improving, becomes engaged to a woman named Madelon who sells candles at the church and has been caring for him.
Moved by the Elizabethan poets and the tragic history of Monmouth the pretender, Baryton loses all interest in psychiatry and leaves for England, putting Bardamu in charge of the asylum.
The four go to a carnival but during the taxi ride back to the asylum Robinson tells Madelon that he doesn't want to be with her because love disgusts him.
[6] Journey to the End of the Night reflects a pessimistic view of the human condition in which suffering, old age and death are the only eternal truths.
According to Merlin Thomas, Céline presents the horror and stupidity of war as an implacable force which "turns the ordinary individual into an animal intent only on survival".
"If you are weak, then you will derive strength from stripping those you fear of all the prestige they pretend to possess.…[T]he attitude of defiance just outlined is an element of hope and personal salvation.
When Alcide volunteers for another stint in colonial Africa in order to pay for the education of his orphaned niece, Bardamu thinks he is acting foolishly, but admires his good intentions.
[13] In Journey to the End of the Night, Céline developed a unique literary language based on the spoken French of the working class, medical and nautical jargon, neologisms, obscenities, and the specialised slang of soldiers, sailors and the criminal underworld.
[16] The clinical tone is frequently associated with sardonic commentary and black humour derived from the futile efforts of characters to control their environment and escape their fate.
The novel attracted admirers and detractors across the political spectrum, with some praising its anarchist, anticolonialist and antimilitarist themes while one critic condemned it as "the cynical, jeering confessions of a man without courage or nobility".
When the prize was awarded to Guy Mazeline's Les Loups, the resulting scandal increased publicity for Céline's novel which sold 50,000 copies in the following two months.