Temps deraisonnables, espace etrange : une lecture du roman Le fidèle Berger d'Alexandre Vialatte

At the end of the year 1942 in occupied France the novelist and translator Alexandre Vialatte published a novel called "The faithful Berger" in which the hero has a delirious fit when, having been captured by the Germans, he is marching towards captivity. Berger is very much like Vialatte's double who had this experience when he was captured in May 1940. Berger, exhausted, in despair over the collapse of his country, sees the world around him become unreal and reality become an enigma. The longer his march lasts, the more this end-of-the-world delirium takes hold of him. He tries to commit suicide and is interned in a Mental hospital. At the end of the novel he is reunited with his own but remains bewildered by his despair. The novelist presents his character as imprisoned in time standing still, a strange closed-in place. The time that the hero lives in is that of the apocalypse, the time of the fall of his country. It is the writer's artistic talent that has made a novel out of this and not a psychopathological account.