ghly personal psychological examination of the world, a reach, through the details and processes of individual experience toward insight into the details and processes of all human experience.
By the time Gide develops The Immoralist, the groundwork for a more direct study of latent homosexuality has been laid, and Gide is free to explore the consequences of a homosexual's making a heterosexual marriage. In The Immoralist, the consequences are hardly favorable, for the portrait of Michel is one of a man whose divided sexuality aggravates (but does not cause) his brutish behavior to loved ones. "There may be some truth in what she says," the line that closes the novel, caps the process of Michel's understanding of his sexual preferences, and in that understanding is contained something like Gide's essay of understanding unconventional sexuality as something besides a joke. The detailed individual portrait of a sexual scoundrel is undoubtedly drawn from direct psychological experience, for Gide details even the decadently exuberant (homo)sexual fan
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