Thoughts on The Immoralist

I wrote this as a reading journal for my Modernism class last semester and thought it would fit well as a blog post. It might be something I'd like to come back to at some point.


In André Gide’s The Immoralist we encounter a man’s apparent descent into a world of darkness and immorality. The turning point in the framed narrative comes at the end of Michel’s long and painful sickness, after traveling throughout Northern Africa with his dutiful wife, and finally recovering his strength and health in Biskra. As Michel recovers he begins to see himself and the world around him in a different light:  “And I compared myself to a palimpsest.  I tasted the scholar’s joy when he discovers under more recent writing, and on the same paper, a very ancient and infinitely more precious text.  What was this occult text? In order to read it, was it not first of all necessary to efface the more recent one?” (43). A palimpsest is a piece of vellum, parchment, paper, or other writing surface which had been scraped of its original writings and reused.  In some cases portions of the original text can still be seen and read below the newer writing, and as Michel states, often the only way to investigate the underlying text is to efface the more recent one.  The most troubling aspect about this statement is not that there is a hidden “occult text” that must be revealed, or that what Michel plans to reveal is particularly disturbing, it is instead the violence implicit in Michel’s realization.