Rating: 
Summary: Inner struggle between feelings and societal views
Review: One evening, Michel calls together three of his close friends from his school days to relate a story to them and to let them decide for themselves what should be done:Michel and his new bride, Marceline, are traveling through Northern Africa on their honeymoon when Michel comes down with tuberculosis. During his recouperation in Biskra, Algeria, Marceline does all she can to nurse him back to health. He slowly recovers, but something in him has changed. Michel loves his Marceline, but disdains her company, preferring to be surrounded by the young boys of the area, in particular Moktir, whom he spies stealing from Marceline. When the weather changes, he and Marceline return to his family farm in Normandy, hoping that this change will evince an even stronger change in him. He strikes up a close friendship with Charles, the 17-year-old son of the farm's manager, and begins to spend more and more time with him, trying to find any excuse he can to be away from Marceline and in the company of Charles. Throughout the novel, Michel struggles with his new yearnings for what may, at the time the novel takes place, be considered the immoral things: his attraction to young men and to the darker side of society, while trying to maintain his marriage. Plus, he has to hide his new feelings behind a false acceptance of society, and it just tears him inside that he must act that way. I alternatley felt sympathy for him as he attempted to understand the new emotions that resulted from his near-death expereince with tuberculosis, and loathing him for his treatment of Marceline who understood what was going on and yet remained by Michel's side. A fascinating character study.
Rating: 
Summary: Self-truth at Any Cost
Review: The Immoralist is straightforward in language and easy to read, but more complicated, more complex are its themes: Man's sense of morality towards society, family, himself. What happens when man's values conflict with those of society's? Whose interests should be served? Gide explores these themes through one man's odyssey of self-discovery. The protagonist is the learned and conflicted Michel who yearns for something more than the stable, predictable, familiar life he has always known, but no longer finds tolerable. It is after a life-threatening bout of tuberculosis that these feelings rise to the surface, intensify, and are more keenly felt. This hunger, still unidentified, takes him on a journey, both literal and figurative, where his search for self-awareness, or self-truth, carries him to distant and exotic locales. New experiences and mysterious encounters give way to a new aestheticism in which weakness, constraint, and life's banalities play no role. Heightened senses, unsuppressed impulses erode age-old human values that were once accepted blindly. A life less checked, though, can have consequences, as is the case for Michel, and for so many others like him. As Michel becomes stronger, his wife becomes weaker. Indeed, society becomes weaker. How can the newly strong fail to quash the weak in their path? The question one must ask, then, and Gide does, is whether a life without restraint has value. Is there something admirable in the old adage, "To thine own self be true"? One of the novel's most inspired moments is found in its ending. Without giving anything away, it is the last passage, after the reader has come full-circle, where Michel's journey seemingly ends. Will Michel embrace his new truth? The reader is left to wonder. The Immoralist is told in narrative, in Michel's own voice. It is self-confessional literature at its highest, and should be read by anyone who reads to think and be moved.
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