Our life is a journey through winter and night

“Our life is a journey through winter and night” is a four-line song attributed to the Swiss Guards of 1793, setting an image of directionless travel in a season of cold and darkness at the threshold of Journey to the End of the Night. The expression’s decisive significance lies in its double scale: it evokes a shared human passage through obscurity while preparing for a novel whose narrator experiences that passage through war, social hardship, and disillusionment.

The Song and Its Image

The epigraph’s four short lines move from a collective statement about human life to a stark scene of searching. Life is figured as a journey; winter and night describe its conditions; the travelers look for a way; and the sky offers no light by which to find one. The movement is not toward a promised destination but toward the difficult act of seeking a path without guidance.

The attribution to the Swiss Guards of 1793 places the song in a historical frame, but the text supplies no further account of its origin or circumstances. Its compact form gives it the character of a maxim or refrain rather than a narrative episode. The plural voice makes the journey common to a group, while the darkness leaves that group without any assurance that its search will succeed.

The Novel’s Reframing of Travel

Immediately after the title and epigraph, the novel’s opening reflection recasts travel as an exercise of the imagination. It distinguishes the imagined journey from the fatigue and disappointment associated with everything else, then makes imagination the journey’s strength. The opening thus does not simply repeat the song’s bleak image: it presents imaginative travel as a way to undertake the passage, even when no light or reliable route is available.

That framing establishes a productive tension. The song speaks of a search for a way through darkness; the narrator’s reflection identifies the journey as imaginary, not as a promise of arrival or escape. Travel matters because the imagination can carry the traveler through experience, while the prospect of a satisfying destination remains uncertain. The epigraph’s night therefore becomes both an image of hardship and the setting in which imaginative movement begins.

Echoes in the Wartime Narrative

The opening image resonates with the narrator’s later account of entering war without understanding its full horror. He describes the war as something that was approaching without the people around him knowing it, and says that he was caught up in a collective movement toward killing. Looking back, he stresses how impossible it had been to imagine what war would reveal about human beings before he was caught inside it. This experience gives the epigraph’s darkness a specific narrative counterpart: the journey proceeds into circumstances the traveler cannot foresee.

The narrator’s response to war also sharpens the difference between searching for a way and finding one. His recognition of the conflict as collective madness does not offer a route out of it. Later, after falling ill and being judged delirious or insane, he encounters competing responses: some people call for him to be shot as an anarchist, while others consider confinement until the war ends. The episode turns the language of guidance and judgment into an institutional problem as well: people claiming sanity decide who counts as mad, even as the surrounding society continues its war.

Darkness, Death, and Official Meaning

In the hospital, the narrator sees death not as a distant abstraction but as something administered through observation, precautions, and documents he is asked to sign. The wounded soldiers are watched, tagged, and counted among those expected to return to the front. Against that context, the song’s shared search through a lightless sky acquires a sharper human cost: the journey is undertaken by people whose movement is shaped by institutions, and whose safety is not secured by the language used to explain their sacrifice.

The novel makes that explanatory language explicit in a conversation about patriotism. A professor presents patriotism and glory as concepts that stir the elite toward altruism, and describes soldiers as abandoning self-preservation in service of the country. The narrator’s earlier image of people traveling through darkness sits in stark contrast with this confidence. The song offers no official purpose or promised reward; the later rhetoric supplies both, but the narrator’s experiences expose the distance between those ideals and the mortal reality they are meant to justify.

Narrative Significance

As an opening expression, “Our life is a journey through winter and night” establishes an atmosphere rather than a plot: it offers no characters, destination, or resolution beyond the act of searching. Its collective voice can be heard alongside the narrator’s later, intensely personal account, creating a contrast between the general human journey and one individual’s passage through war and its aftermath.

The epigraph also helps define the book’s account of travel. The opening reflection treats the journey as imaginary and powerful precisely because imagination can move through experience; the wartime narrative then tests that idea against events that cannot be rendered harmless by imagining them. Winter and night consequently name more than a mood. They frame a world in which people seek direction amid uncertainty, while the narrative repeatedly questions the consoling explanations offered as light.