The Immoralist

The Immoralist follows Michel from his loveless obligation marriage to Marceline, mainly because he promised his father on his deathbed he would not remain alone. At first Michel is amazed to discover Marceline is an individual in her own right, mainly because of his lack of self-awareness which is also why he misses the homoerotic tendency in his growing eroticism for her. As he tells us of his promise to his father to marry, ôI thought of nothing those sad days, but making his last moments easier; and so I pledged my life without knowing what life could

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y, to maybe inadvertently caress a shoulder or touch an arm. The issue Michel suffers from is not the fact that he has homosexual desires but rather his lack of awareness of them. Because he has repressed all of his longings and desires, Michel lives an artificial life. When he discovers this he begins to have sudden outburst of spontaneous behavior, like leaping in lakes and catching eels with fiendish delight. As Guerard (1951) writes, ôThe vengeance of what has been suppressed touches every fiber of MichelÆs intellectual and moral life; determines his self-destructiveness and his anti-intellectualism alike. Restrained from sexual satisfaction and even from self-discovery by an unconscious force, Michel rebels in other waysö (104). Michel, like NietzscheÆs idea of the highest ideal, discovers his authentic, sincere self while trying to achieve some kind of aesthetic that transcends conventional morality. He cannot relate to regular folks by the delights in the immoral acts of his young companions. His appreciation for immorality stems from the repression of his own self and desires due to adopting conventional morality and learning. He cannot reconcile this learning with his interior world, one where he longs for gratifi
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1506
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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