Céline & his night

The novel takes place during the first world war. The main character is a soldier, one of the many who were sent to be slaughtered in the trenches. He realizes this. He hates the war. He doesn't see why he should be fighting it. The Germans never bothered him personally. He doesn't even like fighting. As a child he would avoid it. And now, for the sake of patriotism, he is sent to be slaughtered.

Luckily enough for the character, he is injured and is sent back to Paris while his health improves. He becomes a basket case, so to speak. He does his best to remain in "psychiatric" hospitals: better there than at war. His problem is fear. Doctors try to heal him of it and to inject into him a renewed patriotic fervor.

The night of this story is the bind in which the character lives: he must fight but can't, so he must avoid it while not being persecuted as a trator. A tricky predicament.

What is captivating about this novel is its sense of doom. As readers of 2005, we know that WW1 occured between 1914 and 1918. We know that it ended. This thought is comforting. Yet Céline never alludes to time, and this is the genious of his novel. We don't know what's taking place when. As a reader, it's securing to put a date to such a character's trials. If the narrative is set in 1915, we are aware that there is still so much time left to be recounted. If it is set in 1917-18, we know that the novel's doom is coming to a close. For a reader, such a sense of time is conforting. But seeing that Céline never specifies a date, the reader is stuck with the character in a time that seems like it will never end. When will the war end? We, as those who lived it at the time, don't know. This is how Céline pulls the reader into his night and keeps him/her there for as long as it must last.