Christmas

Christmas is a recurring seasonal marker rather than a self-contained celebration: its return places private decisions and recurrent fear against the winter calendar. It accompanies a possible departure from the asylum, while the book’s other scenes show how darkness, familiar places, and remembered violence can make ordinary life feel precarious.

Winter’s Return and Baryton’s Possible Departure

Winter returns with Christmas as Ferdinand Bardamu notices travel agencies advertising discounted trips to England. While walking the boulevards with Serge Parapine on their way to the movies, he stops to ask about the fares. He later mentions the advertisements to Dr. Baryton at table. Baryton initially lets the information pass, but raises it himself one evening and asks Bardamu to bring him a brochure. The small exchange turns a seasonal advertisement into a practical possibility of departure.

The surrounding routine makes the change tentative rather than triumphant. Between English-literature sessions, Bardamu, Baryton, and Parapine play Japanese billiards or bouchon in an isolation room above the concierge’s lodge, a space fitted with iron bars. In rainy winter weather they spend whole evenings there rather than risk dirtying Baryton’s drawing rooms; occasionally an excitable patient is placed in the room for observation. Christmas thus arrives amid institutional confinement and habitual games, while Baryton’s interest in the brochure hints at a life beyond the asylum without yet confirming that he will go.

Seasonal Darkness and Fear

In an earlier scene, after an evening at a shooting gallery with Lola, Bardamu cannot leave behind the image of the tin wedding targets and the regiment painted nearby. He tells Lola that the figures seem to have been shot at, like himself, across yesterday and tomorrow. As they walk down Avenue Royale toward Saint-Cloud, holding hands, his thoughts remain fixed on the targets; he even forgets to kiss her. By the time they reach the Pont de Saint-Cloud, it is dark. Lola kindly offers dinner at Duval’s, hoping the crowd will cheer him, but the restaurant becomes another scene of imagined danger: Bardamu sees the diners as people waiting for bullets to come at them from every side.

The scene gives fear a seasonal and bodily setting without making Christmas itself its cause. Darkness gathers around an ordinary outing, and the shooting-gallery images carry the violence of war into a public meal. When Bardamu tells Lola that fear has no treatment, he explains that he fears being cremated because ashes would leave nothing that could return to life. He rejects the war and its fighting men, insisting that he does not want to die. The refusal is not a conversion to courage; it is a stark declaration of self-preservation.

A Past That Returns in the Present

The novel’s winter imagery also resonates with Bardamu’s longer history of anxiety. In New York, alone in a dark room at the Laugh Calvin Hotel, he lies awake as an Elevated Railway train shakes the walls and roars across its steel girders. The train’s speed and bodily violence make the city itself seem hostile; he identifies it as what horrified him most. Across the courtyard, illuminated rooms reveal couples going to bed and men shaving with cigars still in their mouths, ordinary routines continuing beyond his isolation.

Later, after meeting Léon Robinson again, Bardamu suspects that the encounter has set his trouble going once more. He struggles from patient to patient, grows increasingly uneasy, and sleeps worse than before. Robinson’s misery seems to revive a bad dream Bardamu has been unable to shake for years. The return of distress is presented as a recurrence, not as a wholly new crisis: a person from the past unsettles the fragile routine of the present.

Memory, Sleeplessness, and the Calendar

Bardamu’s most explicit account of fear’s persistence follows the events surrounding Grandma Henrouille’s fall into the mummy crypt. At night he imagines dramatic continuations of what happened in Toulouse. Fear rises from his gut, seizes his heart, and drives him out of bed to pace through darkness until dawn. He doubts that he will regain enough calm to sleep. The physical sequence—fear, pounding heart, movement through the night—makes memory an active force rather than a safely completed past.

He concludes that he has lost the trust required to sleep soundly among other people and says he will never again sleep fully. Even periods of feverish flu bring only a few bearable days, while Baryton advises against questions about health, which he believes invite anxiety and obsession. Against this continuing strain, Christmas offers no automatic restoration. Its return can mark a possible journey away, but the novel’s darker seasonal pattern is one in which old fear travels with Bardamu: the calendar advances, while sleep and trust remain difficult to recover.