apple fritters

Apple fritters are the small, recurring object through which the novel makes wartime duty, romantic attachment, and bodily anxiety collide. Prepared for Paris’s hospitals under Lola’s supervision, they turn a charitable assignment into a daily ritual of tasting, a cause of distress when Lola gains two pounds, and finally the means by which Ferdinand Bardamu becomes her substitute and partner. Their apparent triviality sharpens the contrast between the immense rhetoric of war and the intimate appetites, fears, and compromises that govern private life.

A Wartime Duty in the Basement

Lola is put in charge of a special service supplying Paris hospitals with apple fritters for the convenience of nurses serving with the American Expeditionary Forces. Thousands of dozens are handed out every morning. The scale gives her work the outward shape of an efficient contribution to the war effort, but Lola has never made a fritter herself. She hires cooks to prepare them; her own responsibility is to taste the finished batches before they go to the hospital wards.

The routine is precise and domestic in its details. Lola rises at ten, bathes, and goes down to the kitchens deep in the basement, wearing a black-and-yellow Japanese kimono given to her by a boyfriend in San Francisco. She performs the task every morning with touching zeal, while the narrator’s account treats the operation’s smoothness as an absurdly cheerful counterpart to the wider slaughter. The fritters are juicy, sweet, and golden; the machinery of service appears to be running well, until its consequences surface at lunch.

Two Pounds and a Sacred Trust

After tasting fritters each day for a month, Lola discovers that she has gained two pounds. Her belt confirms the change: she must move to the next notch. She refuses food at lunch and breaks down in tears, while Bardamu, expecting some grave misfortune or illness, tries to comfort her. The distress is made concrete through the belt and the repeated trip to pharmacies at a distance from one another, where the scales all confirm the same unwelcome result.

Bardamu proposes a practical solution: Lola could hand the tasting over to a friend who wants to gain weight. Lola rejects the idea as shameful desertion rather than a sensible adjustment to a job’s effects. To explain why she cannot shirk the duty, she invokes her great-great-uncle’s place among the crew of the Mayflower, which she says landed in Boston in 1677. In her account, that family history makes even the humble task of tasting fritters a sacred trust. The grand inheritance and the small daily assignment sit side by side, exposing how patriotic obligation can lend solemn meaning to an ordinary chore.

Appetite, Fear, and Domestic Life

From that day, Lola barely touches the fritters. Her fear of gaining weight overwhelms the pleasure she once might have taken in food and begins to wear her down; she becomes as afraid of fritters as Bardamu is of bullets. The object that made her service possible now marks the cost of performing it. The war remains present in the comparison, but it enters this episode through two sharply different bodily anxieties: the danger Bardamu associates with returning to the front and Lola’s dread of a change in her figure.

Their habits together adjust around that dread. They take long, healthful walks along riverbanks and boulevards, and stop going to the Napolitain because ice cream, too, might make Lola gain weight. The fritters thus influence not just her work but the couple’s leisure and daily routine. Bardamu recalls her pale-blue room and its adjoining bathroom as exceptionally comfortable, with photographs and dedications from many handsome male friends spread around it. Against that intimate setting, the food restriction and the walk-centered routine make a private relationship shaped by weight, appetite, and the war’s surrounding pressures.

From Lovers to Partners

The fritters also help secure Bardamu’s place in Lola’s life. Officers compete for her attention, and she cuckolds him two or three times. Their relationship seems endangered until Lola recognizes that he can be put to a more useful purpose: tasting the fritters for her each morning. Bardamu accepts the task. Lola can then regard him as a valiant comrade-in-arms, worthy of the duty she herself has treated as sacred; they become partners as well as lovers.

This exchange gives the fritters a double function. They are the burden Lola can no longer bear without fear, and the work through which Bardamu proves useful enough to remain close to her. His substitution is not a grand act of battlefield courage. It is a mundane service that converts romantic insecurity into shared labor, while the irony of calling the task a sacred mission continues the episode’s comic deflation of wartime heroics.

A Taste of the United States

Serving as Lola’s taster also shapes Bardamu’s imaginative response to America. While physically close to Lola, he associates her body with the promise of a new country and forms the conviction that a nation capable of producing such grace must have other vital revelations to offer. He decides that he will travel there, describing the prospect as a pilgrimage and an adventure. His desire grows out of an intimate relationship rather than a political or patriotic ideal: the everyday work with the fritters places him beside Lola, and that closeness becomes the point from which he imagines a new world.

The apple fritters therefore connect the hospital service, Lola’s family story, her fear of weight gain, the lovers’ changing arrangement, and Bardamu’s wish to cross the Atlantic. They remain ordinary food, but their repeated presence turns them into a measure of what grand causes demand from private bodies—and of how quickly a humble duty can be made sacred, feared, shared, and used as a point of departure.