her physical beauty but for her simple generosity. When Alcide volunteers for another stint in colonial Africa in order to pay for the education of his orphaned niece, Bardamu thinks he is acting foolishly, but admires his good intentions. Style In Journey to the End of the Night, Céline developed a unique literary language based on the spoken French of the working class, medical and nautical jargon, neologisms, obscenities, and the specialised slang of soldiers, sailors and the criminal underworld. Reviewing the novel in 1932, a critic for Les Nouvelles littéraires praised its "extraordinary language, the height of the natural and the artificial" while the critic for Le Populaire de Paris condemned it as mere vulgarity and obscenity. The novel is a first-person narrative. Thomas describes the narrative voice as clinical and detached – the voice of the experienced doctor observing the world through the eyes of his youthful alter ego Bardamu. The clinical tone is frequently associated with sardonic commentary and black humour derived from the futile efforts of characters to control their environment and escape their fate. As McCarthy notes: "It is not just that all men must die, but that each moment of their lives is rendered futile. Everything they do is ridiculous." The clinical and detached narrative voice occasionally gives way to an hallucinatory delirium. Sometimes this is associated with a fever or psychological stress, sometimes it occurs without apparent cause. Vitoux states: "Delirium is the second state of existence that distances dull, prosaic reality, and an excess of which makes the writer (like his hero) incomparably clear-sighted in the very depths of his misery, enabling him to distinguish the true poetic and convulsive realities contained in life and death." Reception and critical reputation Journey to the End of the Night was published in October 1932 to widespread critical attention. The novel attracted admirers and detractors across the political spectrum, with some praising its anarchist, anticolonialist and antimilitarist themes while one critic condemned it as "the cynical, jeering confessions of a man without courage or nobility." The novel was the favourite for the Prix Goncourt of 1932. When the prize was awarded to Guy Mazeline', Les Loups, the resulting scandal increased publicity for Céline's novel which sold 50,000 copies in the following two months. The novel was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1932. Journey to the End of the Night is now considered to be one