The Immoralist

L’Immoraliste · The Immoralist · published 1902 · ISBN 9780141182992

André Gide — André Gide (1869 – 1951) — France, writing in French. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.

“for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight” — The Nobel Committee citation

About André Gide

French novelist, critic and diarist, and one of the most influential European literary voices of the early twentieth century. Gide repeatedly placed people formed by religious and moral discipline before the desire to live truthfully, then traced both the liberation and the damage produced by that choice. He co-founded the Nouvelle Revue Française, denounced colonial abuses after travelling in the Congo, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.

How it came to be

Gide published L’Immoraliste in 1902 after his North African travels and years spent testing the severe Protestant morality of his upbringing. The novel takes the form of a confession delivered by Michel to three friends over one night; a framing letter asks whether he should be rescued, condemned or simply heard. This project’s Vietnamese translation is made directly from the public-domain French original on Wikisource, independent of commercial translations and of the 1930 English version, whose translator is not yet beyond life plus seventy worldwide.

Summary of The Immoralist

Michel, a young scholar newly married, contracts tuberculosis on his North African honeymoon. As he fights back to life he discovers an instinctive health that scholarship and convention had concealed. Back in France with Marceline, Michel increasingly treats duty, property and fidelity as shells to be broken—while the wife who saved him begins to fail.

Analysis & legacy

Michel’s decisive statement is less a hymn to freedom than an impasse after freedom: freeing oneself is only the beginning; the hard thing is knowing what to do with that freedom. Gide builds the novel out of reversals. Michel sickens and revives while Marceline passes from health into decline. He abandons ancient texts for the present body, discipline for fascination with theft, poaching and transgression. Yet vitality never becomes an acquittal. The more honestly Michel follows desire, the more readily he turns Marceline and others into instruments of his experiment. The title is therefore both accurate and a trap: Gide offers no doctrine of immorality, but a narrator intelligent enough to make selfishness sound like philosophy. The lucid prose, brilliant Tunisian landscape and nested confession keep final judgment suspended.

Themes: Freedom and responsibility · Body and illness · Marriage · Desire · Unreliable narration

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Frequently asked questions

What is The Immoralist about?

Michel, a young scholar newly married, contracts tuberculosis on his North African honeymoon. As he fights back to life he discovers an instinctive health that scholarship and convention had concealed. Back in France with Marceline, Michel increasingly treats duty, property and fidelity as shells…

Is The Immoralist worth reading?

Michel’s decisive statement is less a hymn to freedom than an impasse after freedom: freeing oneself is only the beginning; the hard thing is knowing what to do with that freedom. Gide builds the novel out of reversals. Michel sickens and revives while Marceline passes from health into decline. He…

When did André Gide win the Nobel Prize, and why?

André Gide won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947: “for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight”

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