roup of mad characters whose foolishness (along with the farcical nature of the events that he throws at them) are tossed rather merrily about by his unconventional narrative structure. The work was at the time criticized as being anticlerical, and indeed it certainly was in some sense meant as a jab at the power of the Church in France. But to see the work as anticlerical alone, or even as primarily anticlerical, is to miss the major trajectory of Gide's writing at this point - and throughout what is generally considered to be the second and more creative of his periods of literary output.
Gide, no doubt in no small matter because of his sexual orientation (but also because of this home environment, in which he spent much of his time relatively isolated from the world, studying at home with a series of indifferent tutors) had spent much of his early years feeling that he did not belong in the society in which he was raised and in which he lived. His status as a perpetual outsider prompted the nastiness of his critique of society in general, and of the des
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