Journey to the End of the Night

Céline’s masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night, is a polemic, hyper-realistic piece of literature. This novel is filled with black humor as well as cruelty and violence. Céline’s antihero creature, Bardamu, travels from World War I to Africa and then to New York City. From there he journeys on to Detroit to work at the Ford Factory. He then returns to Paris where he finds work as a doctor in a psychiatric hospital. The American author William T. Vollmann provides the reader with an electrifying afterword about this astonishing novel in his essay “The Cruelest Journey Is the Journey Within: The Transformation of Louis-Ferdinand Celine”.