SOURCE: "Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit: The Nation Constructed Through Storytelling," in Romanic Review, Vol. 87, No. 3, May, 1996, pp. 391-403.

In the following essay, Silk examines the fictional invention of national identity in Journey to the End of the Night. According to Silk, "it is in Bardamu's relationship to the bourgeois patriotism of wartime France that one can locate a link to Céline's later embrace of fascism."

Céline's oeuvre, like those of numerous other twentieth-century writers, is strongly marked by the problematic status of the writer's fiction vis-à-vis his politics. For some critics, Céline's anti-semitism and his avowed fascism raise questions about the "quality" of his writings, these overtly ideological works of the late thirties being viewed as the point towards which the works before the fascist "period" move and as the position from which his post-war work emerges. While these questions...