Voyage au bout de la nuit

Ferdinand Bardamu enlists on a whim, swept up by a passing regiment in 1914 — and is instantly disabused of any illusions about glory by the horror of the front. Feigning madness to escape it, he drifts from military hospitals to colonial Africa, where he witnesses the brutal machinery of empire, then to the United States, working the assembly line at Ford in Detroit and wandering the streets of New York.

Back in France, Bardamu finishes his medical studies and settles into a threadbare practice in the Paris suburbs, tending to the poor and the dying with the same corrosive, unsparing eye he's turned on every stop of his journey. Written in slangy, breathless prose that scandalized and electrified French letters in 1932, Voyage au bout de la nuit is a nihilistic descent into a world Céline sees as fundamentally absurd and comfortless.