There's no treatment for fear

“There’s no treatment for fear” is Ferdinand Bardamu’s answer to Lola when she asks whether his apparent madness can be treated. The line strips away the promise of medical care and names the force that has overwhelmed him: fear is not simply a diagnosis, but the condition through which he now imagines survival, death, and what might come after it.

The Question of Madness

Lola visits Bardamu in the prison-like institution where he has been confined. Their encounter differs from the tearful Thursday visits of other patients’ families: the narrator says that neither of them cries. In that setting, Lola asks directly whether Bardamu has gone mad. He admits that it is true, accepting her word for his condition rather than denying what has happened to him.

Her next question turns from diagnosis to treatment. Bardamu answers that fear has no treatment. The exchange is spare and sequential: Lola asks whether he is mad, he concedes it; she asks whether the institution will treat him, and he distinguishes his terror from anything the institution can remedy. The statement’s force comes from that distinction, not from a general rejection of care.

Fear and the Imagination of Death

Bardamu does not leave his answer abstract. He tells Lola that his fear is so severe that, if he later dies naturally, he does not want to be cremated. He would rather be left quietly rotting in the ground, with the possibility—however uncertain—of coming back to life. A skeleton, he reasons, remains more like a person than ashes; cremation would make the end final.

The macabre argument reveals fear working beyond the immediate prospect of death. Bardamu imagines the condition of his remains because even death cannot be allowed to close off every possibility. Burial offers a tenuous opening toward return, while ashes signify irreversible extinction. The body becomes the material on which his terror stages its last distinction between an ending that might be undone and one that cannot.

Meaning and Narrative Role

The line is memorable for its unsparing compression: it names fear as something treatment cannot reach, then the surrounding conversation unfolds the consequences of that claim. Lola’s questions give Bardamu an interlocutor, but they do not soften his answer; their exchange makes his isolation legible precisely because he can explain the fear and still cannot imagine it being cured.

The statement also connects the institution’s language of madness to Bardamu’s own account of what afflicts him. He accepts that he has gone mad, yet identifies fear as the deeper reality. His grim contrast between a buried body and ashes carries that reality to its furthest point: fear persists as an effort to imagine some continuation even when life itself has ended.