Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the End of the Night (, 1932) is the first novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This semi-autobiographical work follows the adventures of Ferdinand Bardamu in World War I, colonial Africa, the United States and the poor suburbs of Paris where he works as a doctor. 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. It is now widely considered to be one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Background Céline began writing Journey to the End of the Night, his first novel, in 1929 while he was working as a doctor in a public clinic in the working class Paris suburb of Clichy. The novel draws on his experience in the French cavalry during World War One, his time in colonial Africa as an employee of a French forestry company, his 1925 visit to the United States as a health officer with the League of Nations, and his experiences as a doctor in Paris. He completed the novel in late 1931 and submitted it to two small publishers and the major publisher Gallimard, before it was accepted by a fourth publisher, Denoël et Steele, which had recently had a success with Eugène Dabit's L'Hôtel du Nord. Journey to the End of the Night was published in October 1932. The title stems from the first stanza of a song attributed by the author to the "Swiss Guards (1793)", and whose French translation is the epigraph of Céline's book: «Notre vie est un voyage / Dans l'Hiver et dans la Nuit / Nous cherchons notre passage / Dans le Ciel où rien ne luit» (Our life is a journey / Through Winter and Night; / We look for our way / In a sky without light). (In reality, the Swiss Guards were abolished in France in 1792. The text is from the poem "Die Nachtreise" (1792) by Karl Ludwig Giesecke. The poem was later set to music by Friedrich Wilke, and was associated with the French invasion of Russia, in which some Swiss regiments were deployed.)