La porte étroite

"The Narrow Door is a work by André Gide, published in 1909 and considered by him not as a novel, but as a story and a counterpart to The Immoralist. The Narrow Door is narrated by one of the main protagonists, Jerome, a "flaccid character [...] implying the prose flaccid", who, moreover, refrains, in the incipit, from making literature: "Others could have made a book of it; but the story I am telling here, I put all my strength into living it and my virtue has worn out. I shall therefore write down my memories very simply, and if they are in tatters in places, I shall not use any invention to patch them up or join them; the effort I would put into their preparation would interfere with the last pleasure I hope to find in saying them. "Gide introduces the voice of the other main character, Alissa, by means of letters and, above all, a diary, an essential piece of the work, which commands and justifies, in the eyes of the author, the writing of all the above. For if Jerome is the narrator, it is around Alissa that the story revolves. This is a case study, and it is in order not to disturb the development of his character that Gide deliberately affixed the other figure in the story: "... without such a hero the tragedy would not have been possible, or at least he would have intervened in the evolution of the woman's character - an evolution that I wanted to be very pure".