The novel of adventures, the tale, the epic are [an] ingenuous manner of experiencing imaginary and significant things. The realistic novel is [a] second oblique manner. It requires something of the first: it needs something of the mirage to make us see it as such. So that it is not only Don Quixote which was written against the books of chivalry, and as a result bears the latter within it, but the novel as a literary genre consists essentially of that absorption.

—José Ortega y Gasset

I'm first of all a Celt—daydreamer, bard. I can turn out legends like taking a leak—with disgusting ease. Scenarios, ballet—anything you like—just while talking. That's my real talent. I harnessed it to realism because I hate man's wickedness so much; because I love combat.

—Céline in a letter to Milton Hindus, 29 May 1947

I

The first thing to be said about Death on the Installment Plan is that it is not a prolongation of Journey to the End of the Night—not, as it may initially seem to be, first a prolongation forward (for thirty-two pages) into the life of the mature Ferdinand who appears in Journey and then one backward (for more than 540 pages) into the childhood of the same Ferdinand. The mature Ferdinand of Death is not the mature Ferdinand of the end of Journey, nor is the eighteen-year-old at the end of Death the same Ferdinand who enlists in the army at the beginning of Journey. For all their fundamental likenesses, the Ferdinand of Journey and the Ferdinand of Death are, in both character and function, quite distinct, and they render the two novels quite distinct.

Why distinctions so primary have not been generally recognized I have difficulty understanding. Perhaps it is because most readers and critics read Journey first, since it is better known and more widely discussed and is, in the opinion of most critics, Céline's best novel. Then, if they go on to read Death, they may be inclined, for obvious reasons, to see it as a backward extension of Ferdinand's adventures in which Céline draws upon his boyhood to repeat, even more savagely, everything that he has said in Journey. Approached in this way, Death may well appear to be a lesser novel, despite the fact that nearly all critics concede its superiority in matters of structure and style. But to read Death in this way is like reading Great Expectations as a revision of David Copperfield. Death is neither a greater nor a lesser Journey; it is a distinct and separate novel that makes its own demands in order to express its own intentions. The similarities are always there. They are bound to be there in any two novels of any novelist. But they are there with variations and developments that make Death a quite different and, in my judgment, a much greater novel.

II

In the first thirty-two pages of Death, which have come to be designated the prologue, Céline introduces Ferdinand Bardamu, the mature "I" who stands behind the boy "I" who then, in the succeeding five hundred forty-one pages, tells the story of his growing up. Or, put another way, the boy "I" is the "I" the mature "I" conjures up from his memories in order to present the fullest possible account of what he was like as a boy and what he went through in growing up. It therefore follows that if we, as readers, are to understand the boy we must first understand the man: whether he is the same Ferdinand who narrated Journey, a few years older but otherwise essentially unchanged, or whether he is a Ferdinand who has, in growing older and becoming a writer as well as a doctor, taken on a somewhat different character.

As the novel opens, Ferdinand is mourning the death of "Madame Bérenge, the concierge … a good friend, gentle and faithful." Alone again, he has no one left to mourn with him:

Those people are all so far away … They've changed their souls, that's a way to be disloyal, to forget, to keep talking about something else.

Poor old Madame Bérenge; they'll come and take her cross-eyed dog away … Someone will have to put out the fire in the lodge. Whom will I write to? I've nobody left. No one to receive the friendly spirits of the dead … and let me speak more softly to the world … I'll have to bear it all alone.

Now these words, I submit, could not have been spoken as Ferdinand here speaks them by the Ferdinand of Journey. While there may be lines in Journey that approximate these, when Ferdinand is speaking of Molly or Bébert or Aleide or Robinson, the tone is different, the expressions of sentiment more guarded. The Ferdinand of Journey could hardly bring in Bérenge's "cross-eyed dog" as unashamedly as Ferdinand does here; nor could he then add, as Ferdinand does here, the line about putting out "the fire in the lodge." And the Ferdinand of Journey could never, under any circumstances, acknowledge that he might wish "to speak more softly to the world."

In the paragraph that follows, as Ferdinand speaks of Madame Bérenge's final moments, he does lapse into the kind of bitterness he so often expresses in Journey. Yet even here the tone is different. While he knows that he can talk about his hatred, and promises to do that "later on if they don't come back," he would rather "tell stories … stories that will make them come back, to kill me." This final phrase, "to kill me," can neither be erased nor denied. It is there, prophetically there. It has to be, since the stories he proposes to tell them (and us) are not stories that anyone wishes to hear, and he must therefore be killed for telling them. "Then," he concludes, in a voice more resigned than defiant, "it will be over and that will be all right with me."

In the passages that follow Ferdinand continues to speak more softly, and seemingly with more self-assurance. In talking with his cousin Gustin, who is also a doctor, he is affectionate, at times even playfully affectionate, and always compassionate. And if he says scathing things about his patients en masse he is kindness itself, for all his ferocious grumbling, when he treats them individually. But then Ferdinand could never, even in his worst moments in Journey, be unkind to his patients—not even when, by his own admission, he behaves "in that stupid way" in treating a sick child:

I had been feeling very strange in mind and body, and the screams of this little innocent made a ghastly impression on me. What screams, my God, what screams! I couldn't bear it another second.

No doubt something else too made me behave in that stupid way. I was so furious I couldn't help expressing, out loud, the rancour and the disgust I had been feeling, too long, inside myself.

"Hey," I said to this little screamer, "don't you be in such a hurry, you little fool! There'll be plenty of time yet for you to yell. There'll be time, don't you worry, you little donkey! Pull yourself together. There'll be unhappiness enough later on to make you cry your eyes out and weep yourself silly, if you don't look out!"

When Ferdinand suffers the same kinds of provocation in a comparable scene in Death he reacts altogether differently—not because he suppresses his feelings of rancor and disgust but because he no longer has such feelings to express or suppress. After putting up with the antics and lamentations of a drunken mother and father, he does everything he can for their sick little girl; then, in a gesture "that was better than talking," he tries to cheer her up by making a swing for her doll. Conceivably the Ferdinand of Journey might have done something like this, although I can't recall an instance in which he actually does, but—and this is the crucial point—he could never, having done such a thing as making a swing for a child's doll, go on to observe: "I thought I'd cheer her up. I'm always good for a laugh when I put my mind to it." In Journey Ferdinand is never good for a laugh—at least not for this kind of a laugh, with no trace of bitterness or satiric bite in it. These are the words of a gentler, more relaxed, more self-assured Ferdinand—a Ferdinand much like the real-life Céline who appears in the reminiscences of his friends of these years.

III

In mentioning the real-life Céline I am not, I hasten to add, trying to validate my interpretation by an appeal to biography. Whether the Ferdinand of Death is more like Céline than the Ferdinand of Journey is of no real consequence here. What matters is that passages such as this—and they recur throughout the early pages of the novel—tend to modify Ferdinand's character in just those ways that lend credibility to his becoming, like Céline himself, a writer who is at once a "daydreamer, bard" and a relentless "realist." Although Ferdinand has not, like Céline, won fame and fortune with his first novel ("I wasn't making enough money yet to go off and write full time"), he has been writing "big fat books," and he is presumably the author of Journey: "a little pimp, Bébert … He ended up on snow. He'd been reading the Journey…." At any rate Gustin's remarks, when Ferdinand first mentions his writing, echo the critical refrain that Journey gave rise to: "'You could talk about something pleasant now and then.' That was Gustin's opinion. 'Life isn't always disgusting.'"

Against this opinion Ferdinand offers no defense. Instead he concedes that Gustin may, in part at least, be right:

In a way he's right. With me it's kind of a mania, a bias. The fact is that in the days when I had that buzzing in both ears, even worse than now, and attacks of fever all day long, I wasn't half so gloomy … I had lovely dreams … Madame Vitruve, my secretary, was talking about it only the other day. She knew how I tormented myself. When a man's so generous, he squanders his treasures, loses sight of them. I said to myself: "That damn Vitruve, she's hidden them some place …" Real marvels they were … bits of Legend, pure delight … That's the kind of stuff I'm going to write from now on….

Although Ferdinand's manner is playful—as, for instance, when he is talking about squandering his treasures—he is nevertheless responding seriously to Gustin's criticism. "I might," he remarks a bit later, "have consulted some sensitive soul … well versed in fine feelings … in all the innumerable shadings of love…." But, he adds, "sensitive souls are often impotent." And so, when he rediscovers the "bits of Legend" that he had written earlier, "the kind of stuff I'm going to write from now on," he again turns to Gustin:

I wanted to talk to him about my Legend. We'd found the first part under Mireille's bed. I was badly disappointed when I reread it. The passage of time hadn't helped my romance any. After years of oblivion a child of fancy can look pretty tawdry … Well, with Gustin I could always count on a frank, sincere opinion. I tried to put him in the right frame of mind.

"Gustin," I said. "You haven't always been the mug you are today, bogged down by circumstances, work, and thirst, the most disastrous of servitudes … Do you think that, just for a moment, you can revive the poetry in you?… are your heart and cock still capable of leaping to the words of an epic, sad to be sure, but noble … resplendent? You feel up to it?"

Gustin's response to Ferdinand's affectionate banter is wonderfully appropriate: he dozes on without saying a word. But that doesn't stop Ferdinand, who proceeds to read the part of his legend that recounts the death of "Gwendor the Magnificent, Prince of Christiania." And while Gwendor's death is a mixture of gore and sentimentality, the rhetoric with which he expresses it is truly impressive, as Ferdinand himself points out when, at a climactic moment, he interjects, "Get a load of this." Nevertheless Gustin, who may still be dozing, remains unimpressed:

Gustin's arms dangled between his legs.

"Well, how do you like it?" I asked him.

He was on his guard. He wasn't too eager to be rejuvenated. He resisted. He wanted me to explain the whole thing to him, the whys and wherefores. That's not so easy. Such things are as frail as butterflies. A touch and they fall to pieces in your hands and you feel soiled. What's the use? I didn't press the matter.

Yet if Ferdinand does not press the matter he still continues to read—until Gustin, in what may be taken as his ultimate critical statement, falls "sound asleep." And his later expressions of kindly tolerance, when Ferdinand is about to read more of his legend, are equally discouraging: "Go on, Ferdinand, go ahead and read, I'll listen to the damn thing. Not too fast, though. And cut out the gestures. It wears you out and it makes me dizzy."

IV

While there is, by this time, no mistaking Gustin's response to King Krogold, Ferdinand's attitude remains ambiguous. From the time when he and Vitruve and Mireille find the first part of the legend "under Mireille's bed," where she not only sleeps but earns her living, there is a tone of mockery in just about everything he says about the legend—a tone which belies his seeming sincerity in defending his "masterpiece," particularly when his defense ("Such things are as frail as butterflies") seems almost as absurd as the "masterpiece" he is defending. For that matter the legend is riddled with lines totally out of keeping with its overall mood and tone—as, for instance, in the following passages:

Gwendor's army has just suffered a terrible defeat … King Krogold himself caught sight of him in the thick of the fray … and clove him in twain … Krogold is no do-nothing king … He metes out his own justice…. (my italics)

After the battle King Krogold, his knights, his pages, his brother the archbishop, the clerics of his camp, the whole court, went to the great tent in the middle of the bivouac and dropped with weariness. The heavy gold crescent, a gift from the caliph, was nowhere to be found … Ordinarily it surmounted the royal dais. The captain entrusted with its safekeeping was beaten to a pulp. The king lies down, tries to sleep … He is still suffering from his wounds. He wakes. Sleep refuses to come … He reviles the snorers. He rises. He steps over sleepers, crushing a hand here and there, leaves the tent … (my italics)

That the italicized lines are intentional seems beyond question. But are they to be understood as the inadvertent slips of a hopelessly naive Ferdinand? Or of a Ferdinand who cannot quite stomach the rhetoric of his "romance"? Or are they direct authorial intrusions on the part of Céline in which he is playfully undercutting the pretensions of the legend? The truth is, unless I have somehow been remiss in my reading, the novel provides no satisfactory answer to these questions.

Equally puzzling, though in a somewhat different sense, is the passage in which Gwendor meets Death:

"O Death! Great is my remorse! Endless my shame … Behold these poor corpses!… An eternity of silence will not soften my lot …"

"There is no softness or gentleness in this world, Gwendor, but only myth! All kingdoms end in a dream …"

"O Death, give me a little time … a day or two. I must find out who betrayed me …"

"Everything betrays, Gwendor … The passions belong to no one, even love is only the flower of life in the garden of youth."

And very gently Death gathers up the prince … He has ceased to resist … His weight has left him … And then a beautiful dream takes possession of his soul … The dream that often came to him when he was little, in his fur cradle, in the Chamber of the Heirs, close to his Moravian nurse in the castle of King René…. (my italics)

The words of Death that I have italicized express Céline's titular theme so eloquently that they might stand as an epigraph to the entire novel. But why, if this is true, are they tucked away in the middle of the gory legend, then encased in the rhetorical trappings that Gustin, and Ferdinand too at times, find either boring or funny? Are the italicized words another disguised authorial intrusion in which Céline is mocking the pretensions of the legend from a still different angle—by inserting lines more appropriate to the death of his old teacher, Metitpois, than to the poeticized death of Gwendor? Or is the entire passage a virtuoso performance in which Céline, via Ferdinand, is exercising his literary prowess ("I could make alligators dance to Pan's flute") by demonstrating that he can, when he chooses, imbue his high-flown rhetoric with significant meaning? To these and related questions the novel once again provides no clearcut answers.

But—and I know this question will, to many critics, seem dangerously heretical—does this lack of certainty really matter that much? Do we, as readers, have to know exactly how much Ferdinand the writer knows at any given moment about his own writing—especially when the effects of that writing are not dependent on how much Ferdinand knows? Do we, in reading Don Quixote, have to know exactly how much Don Quixote knows at any given moment when the effects of what he is saying and doing are not dependent on how much he knows? Nevertheless, it may be objected, Sancho Panza is always there to let Don Quixote (and the reader) know just how foolish he is being. Where is Ferdinand's Sancho?

The obvious answer is Gustin, who plays a straightforward Panzaic role throughout Ferdinand's readings. Vitruve also functions Panzaically, as does her niece Mireille. But it is Ferdinand himself, in his real or assumed naïveté, who most effectively undercuts his own dreams of what is "noble … resplendent." Up to the time of his delirium, Ferdinand is a divided personality: on his Quixotic side, he tries to believe in and defend his romance even as, on his Panzaic side, he can't help revealing how his own life and the lives of all those around him give the lie to all his idealistic fancies—just as Metitpois's death gives the lie to "his classical memories, his resolutions, the example of Caesar …" The effect of these Panzaic revelations is therefore to permit us, as readers, to see clearly what Ferdinand has only begun to see dimly, namely, that the gory agonies in his legend are but rhetorical fantasies he has concocted in a vain attempt to escape what he and the people around him are going through; that his legend is to him what drinking is to Gustin, what Mireille's dirty stories are to her, what his mother's memories of his father are to her.

V

Toward the end of the prologue Céline sends Ferdinand into a fever or delirium in which he comes close to madness before he finally resolves his inner conflicts. The delirium is brought on by his trip to the Bois with Mireille, the girl with the "sumptuous ass." "Christ Almighty, what a rear end. That ass of hers was a public scandal." Yet this is not, he explains, what attracts him: "What attracts me is your imagination … I'm a voyeur. You tell me dirty stories … And I'll tell you a beautiful legend … Is it a bargain?… fifty-fifty … you'll be getting the best of it." Ferdinand then tells her the story, complete with settings and costumes, of "Thibaud the Wicked, a troubadour." "The tone appealed to Mireille; she wanted more." But on the way home they abandon his "beautiful Legend for a furious discussion about whether what women really wanted was to shack up with each other"—a discussion that ends up with Ferdinand talking about dildoes and Mireille, going still further, talking about girls growing phalluses "so they can rip each other's guts out." At this point, apparently feeling that Mireille has not only outdone him but will tell the whole world that he has "behaved like a beast," Ferdinand first resorts to violence and then goes off into a delirium that ends with the words: "It was hell."

When he comes to, after being brought home by an ambulance, he is in bed, and his mother and Vitruve are in the next room waiting for his fever to go down. But fever is not all he is suffering from: "Fever or not, I always have such a buzzing in both ears that it can't get much worse. I've had it since the war. Madness has been hot on my trial … no exaggeration … for twenty-two years." But he outruns her; he raves faster than she can: "That's how I do it. I shoot the shit. I charm her." Yet it isn't easy: "My thoughts stagger and sprawl … I'm not very good to them. I'm working up the opera of the deluge … I'm the devil's stationmaster … The last gasp is very demanding. It's the last movie and nothing more to come. A lot of people don't know. You've got to knock yourself out. I'll be up to it soon…." By the time he gets to the last few lines Ferdinand's near madness has been transformed into near sainthood, and he is once more the Ferdinand he was in the opening pages. He is knocking himself out—for us—so that we can know what we don't yet know: the truth about life and death. And he does this knowing full well that we, his readers, will come back to kill him.

In putting Ferdinand back together again as a near saint who is writing (as well as doctoring) in order to save us, Céline comes as close to revealing Ferdinand's deeper motives as he ever comes in the prologue. For his compassion, though always disguised, is always there. It is there when he is mourning Madame Bérenge's death; when he walks blocks out of his way because a stray dog is following him and he has to feed it and try to save it; when he speaks so tenderly to Gustin, as he always does, and excuses his looking "to the bottle for forgetfulness"; when he says, "I wouldn't want to be too hard on Vitruve. Maybe she has had more trouble than I have"; when he looks at his mother's crippled leg "as skinny as a poker" and says, "I've seen it all my life." Céline cannot, however, permit Ferdinand to remain a near saint—either as doctor or writer. No one would believe in him then. He cannot even permit him to be a near hero. Heroes can only feel and see and know what Gwendor knows, or what Metitpois knows, "with his classical memories, his resolutions, the example of Caesar"; whereas Ferdinand feels and sees and knows what Death knows, what Death tells Gwendor: that "there is no softness or gentleness in this world … but only myth! All kingdoms end in a dream."

In bringing Ferdinand to a full understanding of these words Céline renders him forever incapable of being heroic, or for that matter, of acting, or speaking, or writing heroically—except in play or jest. When Ferdinand can no longer believe in dreams and myths he can no longer be a hero. He may perform actions that outwardly correspond to those of a hero; he may even risk his own life to save others; yet so long as he performs these actions without believing that they will somehow make people or the world better, without, in short, believing that they have any meaning beyond their material consequences, his actions cannot possibly be heroic. To be heroic they would have to derive from, or express, beliefs or faiths or dreams or myths that evade or deny the real world. For Céline as for Ortega y Gasset "materiality" contains a "critical power which defeats the claim to self-sufficiency of all idealizations, wishes and fancies of man … the insufficiency of all that is noble, clear, lofty." In the novel, Ortega explains, "reality, the actual can be changed into poetic substance" but only "as destruction of the myth, as criticism of the myth. In this form reality, which is of an inert and insignificant nature, quiet and mute, acquires movement, is changed into an active power of aggression against the crystalline orb of the ideal. The enchantment of the latter broken, it falls into fine, iridescent dust which gradually loses its colors until it becomes an earthy brown. We are present at this scene in every novel."

I have quoted Ortega at such length because his critical argument so closely anticipates the dramatic argument with which Céline concludes the prologue—as he brings Ferdinand, still in bed, and still so feverish that he intermittently lapses into delirium, into direct conflict with his mother's idealized account of her life with his dead father:

She's telling Madame Vitruve the story of her life … Over and over again, to make it clear what a time she's had with me. Extravagant … irresponsible … lazy … nothing like his father … he so conscientious … so hardworking … so deserving … so unlucky … who passed on last winter … Sure … she doesn't tell her about the dishes he broke on her bean … how he used to drag her through the back room by the hair … Not one word about all that … nothing but poetry … Yes, we lived in cramped quarters, but we loved each other so. That's what she was saying. Papa was fond of me, he was so sensitive about every little thing that my behavior … so much to worry about … my alarming propensities, the terrible trouble I gave him … hastened his death … all that grief and anguish affected his heart. Plop! The fairy tales people tell each other … they make a certain amount of sense, but they're a pack of filthy stinking lies….

Ferdinand here defines it all, both for himself and for the reader: "Nothing but poetry," or "a pack of filthy lies." Enough to make Ferdinand leave his sick-bed to vomit. And when the lies continue he "can't stand it," and takes refuge in his legend: "If I've got to be delirious, I'd rather wallow in stories of my own." If, in other words, he has to wallow, he would rather wallow in his own "pack of lies" than in his mother's. And that is what he immediately proceeds to do:

I see Thibaud the Troubadour … He's always in need of money … He's going to kill Joad's father … Well, at least that will be one father less in the world … I see splendid tournaments on the ceiling … I see lancers impaling each other … I see King Krogold himself … He has come from the north … He had been invited to Bredonnes with his whole court … I see his daughter Wanda, the Blonde, the Radiant … I wouldn't mind jerking off, but I'm too sticky … Joad is horny in love … Oh well, why not….

In his interjected comments, Ferdinand is jerking off to, or trying to jerk off to, his own stories in much the same way that his mother, as he sees her, has been jerking off to hers. But his mother's fantasies, as he listens to her talking to Vitruve, overwhelm his own: "I can't stand the sight of her anymore, she gives me the creeps. She wants me to share in her fantasies … I'm not in the mood … I want to have my own fantasies…."

At this point Ferdinand lapses into another delirium in which he sees himself in his "gallant ship" on "a long tack across the Etoile," only to come to as his mother says: "Ah, if only your father were here"—words that so inflame Ferdinand's feelings of hatred that he yells them straight at his mother: "My father, I say, was a skunk! I yell my lungs out … "There was no lousier bastard in the whole universe! from the Galeries-Lafayette to Capricorne….'" At first his mother is "stupefied. Transfixed…." After that she attacks—with words, fits, and finally the umbrella, which she breaks across his face. But Ferdinand refuses to give way. In a finale that is at once a prevision of the rest of the novel and a restatement of the artistic commitment with which he opens the prologue, he declares that he will not put up with his mother's idealized memories: "I'll protest if it kills me. I repeat that he was a sneak, brute, hypocrite, and yellow in every way."

Everything Ferdinand says or does in his battle with his mother reveals his powerful Oedipal jealousy: "The deader he is the more she loves him. Like a she-dog that can't get enough … But I won't put up with it…." And when she starts up again and is "ready to die for her Auguste," he threatens to "smash her face," but instead, "in a blind rage," he smashes her, as well as himself, with gestures and words that come straight from the depths of his Oedipal agony: "I bend over and lift up her skirt. I see her calf as skinny as a poker, without any flesh on it, her stocking all sagging, it's foul … I've seen it all my life … I puke on it, the works …" Unnerved finally, his mother backs away and runs for the stairs, while Ferdinand—and this is the final touch—hears "her limp all the way down."

VI

This is the mature Ferdinand who is, in the guise of the boy Ferdinand, about to tell the story of his growing up. And he has, through his words and actions, foreshadowed the nature of the story that he feels he must tell, the way that he feels he must tell it—or, more accurately, he has foreshadowed the first 325 pages of the story that he feels he must tell; namely, the story of his inability to deny his feelings in order to become like his parents. And because both his father and mother, along with nearly everyone else in their world, are mired in middle-class poverty and ideals that sustain people in that condition, it is to be the story of his struggle to overcome the neglect and even hatred, disguised as love and sacrifice and virtue, to which he is constantly subjected. And because he has come to realize that "there is no softness or gentleness in this world," that the myths in which these ideals are enshrined are like his own legend, or on another level, Mireille's "dirty stories," or the fairy tales his mother tells about his father, his story is to be not a legend or a fairy tale, but a protest against all "the fairy tales people tell each other"—all the fairy tales that people jerk off to.

What Ferdinand's words do not foreshadow, however, is the latter or Courtial half of the novel, which is something of a legend or fairy tale in itself, though of a totally different kind. Courtial, the fatherly Quixote, takes the sixteen-year-old Ferdinand as his Panzaic son, and together they defy the world's lies with hopes and dreams of their own—until the world finally catches up with them and reduces their "crystalline orb" to an "earthy brown." Céline's choosing not to foreshadow or in any direct way acknowledge or anticipate this latter half of the novel raises a number of questions for which once again, I have no very satisfactory answers. Possibly he felt that he could not allow Ferdinand to speak directly about that part of his life in which he was happy without lessening the intensity of the tragic outlook he is trying to establish. Or possibly Céline felt that everything Ferdinand says about his legend and about the stories he is going to tell actually does apply to the second half of the novel, since it too ends on a note of despair. It can even be argued that Courtial is present in spirit if not in name when Ferdinand tries to speak more softly to the world, or when, more specifically, he remembers the pitiful dreams of Auguste, his dead father: "I think of Auguste, he liked boats too … He was an artist at heart … He had no luck … he drew storms now and then on my blackboard."

Yet Ferdinand's softness never impairs his vision. Auguste's dreams, unlike Courtial's, are but impotent fantasies. For him there is nothing in this world but the lies he tries to live by and would have others live by. He, along with almost everyone else, has become like the people Ferdinand described earlier in Journey: "they really have got love in reserve … Only it's a pity people should still be such sods, with so much love in reserve." The distinction Ferdinand draws here is critical. For if he can pity people for being such sods he cannot pity what they do, as sods, to themselves and one another, in the name of some fairy tale or another. What they do, as sods, he hates; the fairy tales that provide them with both impetus and justification for doing what they do he hates even more. And he is determined to express his hatred so forcefully that he will, as he promises in the very beginning of the prologue, "tell stories that will make them come back, to kill me, from the ends of the world."

Having revealed so much about himself and the stories he will tell, the mature Ferdinand makes his final exit by first asking Emilie, the maid, who is still there beside his bed, to lie down with him in her clothes, so that she can accompany him on a make-believe cruise (presumably a continuation of the cruise he embarked on earlier in his delirium). The significance of the ports of call on this cruise Emilie "doesn't get," although her response indicates that she understands the lying down part: "'Tomorrow,' she says, 'Tomorrow….'" With only this promise to sustain him, Ferdinand is "really alone," as he was at the opening of the prologue; and he sees, as he returns to his delirious state, "thousands and thousands of little skiffs returning high above the Left Bank … Each one had a shriveled little corpse under its sail … and his story … his little lies to catch the wind with." And these are the same "dead" (now corpses and in skiffs), the same "lies" ("the fairy tales people tell each other … a pack of filthy stinking lies") Ferdinand encounters at the beginning of his cruise: "The whole town is on deck. All those dead—I know them all … The pianist has caught on … He's playing the tune we need: 'Black Joe' … for a cruise … to catch the wind and weather … and the lies…."