Journey to the End of the Night

“Could I, I thought, be the last coward on earth? How terrifying!”

Bardamu’s experiences in World War I strip away any pretense of heroism or duty. Bardamu is unrepentant in his hatred of the war, and in this aphoristic statement he equates cowardice with reason. If he is the last coward, then European society has lost its capacity to recognize horror. His wry comment, “how terrifying” (18), suggests that what others term cowardice is a socially necessary force.

“The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of nastiness.”

Bardamu’s story follows his journey into the depths of human “nastiness” (28), making his narrative an effort not to forget. Bardamu is an alienated individual who sees his alienation reflected in the world around him. This early statement functions as a manifesto for the book, announcing its intention to serve as a reminder of ugly truths.

“That was when they started shooting the soldiers to bolster their morale, whole squadrons of them.”

Bardamu does not like the war. His curt, cynical narration strips back the pageantry and heroism projected onto the conflict by civilians. There are no good people on either side, Bardamu believes, which is made evident in the way that human lives are so expendable that people can be shot to deter desertion. This self-defeating act is, for Bardamu, emblematic of the self-defeating war as a whole.