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Journey to the End of the Night
Louis Ferdinand Celine Book Review

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Plot Summary of Journey to the End of the Night
"Celine's misanthropic 1932 novel broke radically with French literary traditions in both style and subject matter. "Celine often said that he regarded himself primarily as a stylist. He held that the French literary language was stiff and spent with age, that classicism and academicism had emasculated the language of Villon and Rabelais, and that in our age emotion could be captured only in the spoken tongue."
Yevgeny Bazarov, Resident Scholar

"Celine's alter ego, Bardamu, undergoes the idiocy of World War I and then becomes a doctor attempting to care for broken and diseased people after the war. He's sort of a contemporary and older brother of some of the characters in Henry Miller and Bukowski. But he's colder, more bitter, more corrosive in his judgments of the world, of women, of himself. The story takes him through the war, to French West Africa, Manhattan, and back to Paris, and it has a dreamlike, hallucinatory quality. It's easy to dislike him, for his tenderness and regret is subtle and elusive under all the ostensible sarcasm and misogyny, but it's there -- and couched in beautiful, often breathtaking as well as bracing prose."
David Loftus, Resident Scholar

Review Analysis of Journey to the End of the Night
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Ratings are on a 1-10 scale (Low to High)
Plot
Tone of book? - depressed
Time/era of story - 1900-1920's
Life of a profession: - doctor
Inside culture (main char) - French
Culture clash? - visiting a culture in other country
Is this an adult or child's book? - Adult or Young Adult Book
Outside culture (society) - French
War/Revolt/Disaster on civilians Yes
Job/Profession/Status story Yes
Ethnic/regional/gender life Yes
Conflict: - War, general - War, WW I

Main Character
Gender - Male
Profession/status: - infantry soldier - doctor
Age: - 20's-30's
How sensitive is this character? - sensitive to others' feelings
Sense of humor - Cynical sense of humor
Intelligence - Smarter than most other characters
Physique - average physique

Setting
How much descriptions of surroundings? - 4 (a fair amount)
United States Yes
The US: - Northeast
Europe Yes
European country: - France
Africa Yes
Jungles? Yes
Water? Yes
City? Yes
City: - New York - dirty, grimy (like New York) - dangerous
Misc setting - fort/military installation

Style
Person - mostly 1st
Accounts of torture and death? - explicit references to deaths
Sex in book? Yes
What kind of sex: - touching of anatomy - actual description of hetero sex - descript. of female anat. (the big V)
Lot of foul language? Yes
Amount of dialog - significantly more dialog than descript - significantly more descript than dialog
Most similar books to Journey to the End of the Night
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
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Of Love and War by Vanessa Alexander
The Wars by Timothy Findley


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