Journey to the End of the Night

In Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline jabs at war, colonialism, the U.S., the medical profession and anything that comes along the way. His writing style, its coarse language and cynical humor, reflects his irreverence toward norms, and animates his contempt for society and pessimism toward the human condition. The book starts like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, hammering at the futility of war, where wide-eyed youths waste their lives fighting for the ambitions of bureaucrats and return with disillusion, wrecked health, chronic unemployment and alienation from society. When our antihero Ferdinand Bardamu goes to Africa, we feel like reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which exposes cruelty and inhumanity in colonial outposts and multinational enterprises’ exploiting the natives for profit. Bardamu’s travel to the U.S. and struggle to stay alive remind us of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, where the business conglomerates exploit cheap laborers, squeezing every ounce of life from them, to maximize profit and shareholder value.  In our antihero’s return to France, we recall Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and any number of Honoré de Balzac’s works, with the masses struggling to eke out a living. In the novel, the characters lie, steal, and even kill to survive and live anyway they could. It’s rats fighting each other for scum.

Night in Paris

As the title indicates, our antihero, and his friends and acquaintances, journeys through the dark night of life, in the hope that the end would come soon and the darkness would end. Toward the end of the novel, his friend Robinson, after all his suffering and failure and disillusions, chooses death to end this night. This novel, based on Céline’s life, reveals his disgust for society, government, and humanity.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Knut Hamsun's Hunger: A Psychological Novel

In Knut Hamsun's Hunger, the narrator and protagonist roams the streets of Kristiania (Oslo) and searches for food and later lodging. A writer of questionable success, he submits his writings to a journal but rarely gets the story accepted. Without money, he often doesn't eat for days.

As we read the novel, we dwell into the mind occasionally delusion of a man trying to maintain his dignity in poverty. Though he had no food, he gives money to children and vagrants. And though he fancies a girl, he feels unworthy of her. His unstable state of mind reminds us of Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. And indeed, Hunger is as much a psychological novel as Dostoyevsky's classic work but it dwells into the unstable mind in greater details.

Kristiania (Oslo)

Through the novel, Hamsun comments on Oslo's coming of age and on civilization crossing into the twentieth century. The narrator's interactions with others reveal the alienation in a modern city. His plight and despair, and his suffering and struggles are those of modern men and women. In the end, he leaves Kristiania, a symbol of his escaping from the modern life.

Knut Hansum

Hunger is a powerful tale of the currents of history sweeping individuals off their grounds of existence and tossing them into an ocean of despair. Even now, more than a hundred years later, we confront similar challenges and the novel remains relevant. The question was and is: how shall we respond to such challenges?