Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”

All these words has touched me deeply in a part of my life.

Provocation and contradiction. Tragedy and digestion. The hero of the novel Bardamu exists between the two world wars. But he knows that the real two wars between birth and death. While reading, it made me persistently ask these questions; When will you find yourself? When will you meet yourself? Won’t you stop falling? Did you give up on yourself or is it just a lie that is good for you? Have you forgotten to feel? What was feeling? At this very point I was able to observe the character. He was trying to exist by ignoring himself. He preferred lying to death.

As a human, we feel everything more than necessary. What about those who can’t feel? Nobody thought much about them. Aren’t those who can’t feel are those who feel to not feel.

‘’There’s no tyrant like a brain.’’ He approaches the issue of existence with these words just like A.Camus, J.P. Sartre. You have to lose yourself to overcome this tyrant. Another important thing ‘’In every field, the main defeat is forgetting, especially forgetting what killed you.’’ You have to remember, you have to forget by remember. You can’t forget if you don’t remember.

You get lost in this book. On the road to truth. You understand that you are approaching death with truth. Then you disappear into truth. That’s where you’re lost.