Preview of Man's Fate Summary:

Although the particular historical events around which his novels revolve may change, several recurrent themes dominate Malraux's literary perspective. For instance, exoticism and violence, blindness and suffering, and the ubiquitous presence of death appear throughout his writings. Malraux portrays the human condition as tragic, but it is precisely in confronting this situation, that man experiences hope.

His novels, therefore, oscillate between the pessimism of individual existence and the optimism of collective action.

In Man's Fate Malraux recreates the 1927 Shanghai workers' strike and Chiang Kai-shek's subsequent military struggle against the Communists, because he saw in this political cauldron a perfect metaphor for man's tragic situation as well as the ideal setting to express his own poetic image of mankind, namely, men united in death for a common cause. Unlike the historical reality it portrays, however, Malraux's fictional world demands that its hero die, for only in sacrificial death can...