Ferdinand falls ill with a fever and becomes delirious, causing him to set fire to the hut. There, he takes the place of a mysterious trader whom he later realizes is his old comrade Robinson. He takes up a rubber trading post in the interior, which turns out to be a hut. She breaks things off after a few months, and Ferdinand travels to French West Africa. He begins another affair with a dancer and violinist named Musyne. He is eventually pronounced in good health but unfit for duty, and secures his release. The loss of Lola precipitates Ferdinand’s mental breakdown, and he is transferred to a series of mental hospitals.
When Lola realizes that Ferdinand is attempting to avoid returning to active duty, her passion for him wanes and she abandons their affair. There, he meets an American volunteer nurse named Lola with whom he has an affair. Ferdinand is wounded (for which he receives a medal) and goes on leave to Paris to receive medical treatment. During one of his missions, he meets a fellow soldier and coward Leon Robinson, with whom he plots an unsuccessful desertion. At the front, Ferdinand assumes the post of a runner, and the seemingly pointless brutality of the war quickly disabuses him of his momentary nationalism.
Despite his political leanings, he is moved by the theater of a military parade and decides to enlist in the French army. When the novel opens, Ferdinand is a student of medicine in Paris.
More recently, as Celine’s reputation as an anti-Semite and Axis sympathizer has come to the fore, the book’s legacy has become more controversial. The novel became influential in avant-garde prose movements but was (like many such touchstones) originally disliked by the critical establishment. It is a semi-autobiographical work centered on the life and travels of cynical antihero Ferdinand Bardamu, set over several decades of Bardamu’s life, beginning at the outbreak of the First World War. Journey to the End of the Night is a modernist novel by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, first published in the French language in 1932 by Parisian publishing house Éditions Denoël et Steele.
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