Reviews

The Immoralist by André Gide

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sidharthvardhan's review against another edition

5.0

“ The fear of find ing oneself alone-that is what they suffer from and so they don't find themselves at all.”

“Men's finest works bear the persistent marks of pain. What would there be in a story of happines s? Only what prepares it, only what de stroys it can be told.”

Micheal, who has been a puritian all his life and who married only to keep his father’s wish, falls fatally ill with TB on his honey-moon. Except he doesn’t die, the finding that he gets sexually attracted to young Arab boys helps him recover. Weird! Fortunately the book moves away from theme of pedophilia.

Later his wife will fell fatally ill. It gets kind of boring with pages upon pages of description of health of these characters. Since morality was never my strong point, I thought I could relate to the immoralist. It wasn’t the case.

Micheal has changed after recovering from his sickness. Such a close brushing with death makes him realize how alive he is – something which, according to him, he hadn’t understood till now and which nobody else understands either:

What is important is that Death had touched me, as people say, with its wing. What is important is that I came to think it a very astonishing thing to be alive, that every day shone for me, an unhoped-for light. Before, thought I, I did not understand I was alive. The thrilling discovery of life was to be mine.

…. And then they say John Kramer’s methods don’t work!

Isn’t this fear ever present in our mind? That we might be missing our only chance to live. Most of us must have felt barred in some way by considerations of our family or future. Micheal refuses to let these considerations stop him from trying to live.

And how is one supposed to live?

“To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.”

Think of society as a classroom in which Morality is a teacher telling us how we shouldn’t be doing most of things we enjoy because they are wrong. Now Micheal before his ‘thrilling discovery’ was like that kid who obediently follows all the instructions. He expected a kind of disgust if he was to fail to do so.

But there are no rewards for following the rules. And so one day he breaks one of those rules in frustration, and he finds himself enjoying the whole thing. He feels a thrill, the kind you feel when you have fought away any long term submission. It is repeatedly finding this very ‘thrill’ that he now considers real living. ‘by looking at any particular trait, we develop and exaggerate it’ - and so his discovery is nothing more than kind of psychological satisfaction some people drive from using swear words.

Believing it to be the only way to live, he now moves to this other extreme and wants to start a revolution. Not only he finds joy in doing things just because he considers them immoral, but he also enjoys provoking others to do so too or simply listening to immoral acts done by others.

He considers anyone who doesn’t go his way insincere. ‘I had to admit that the worst instinct of every human being appeared to me the sincerest.’ Now that is where we disagree. I believe there might be people out there whose sincerest instincts need not be base. Not me, mine is to destroy the world but there are probably others. And after all, not all instincts are black or white.

And who shall say how many passions and how many hostile thoughts may live together in the mind of man?

I think normal people instinctively know the best way to deal with Ms. Morality’s strictness, which Micheal found after all this trouble - it is the middle one, stealing little pleasures. Instead of being an obedient slave or an open rebel, learn to smuggle in candies.

“And it is in such a way, with a mixture of reserve and of daring, of submission and revolt carefully concerted, of extreme demand and prudent concession, that I have finally learned to accept myself.”

More Quotes
Spoiler

"I depicted artistic culture as welling up in a whole people, like a secretion, which is at first a sign of plethora, of a superabundance of health, but which afterwards stiff ens, hardens, forbids the perfect contact of the mind with nature, hides un der the persistent appearance of life a diminution of life, turns into an outside sheath, in which the cramped mind languishes and pines, in which at last 8o The immor alist it dies. Finally, pushing my thought to its logical con clusion, I showed culture, born of life, as the de stroyer of life."

"One must allow other people to be right," he used to say when he was insulted; "it consoles them for not being anyth ing else."

"but most of them believe that it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psycholog ical distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates; he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him."

"Regrets, remorse, repentance, are past joys seen from behind".