Les ravages de l’ennui chez Julien Green

This article covers the ravages of boredom in a few novels by Julien Green (Mont-Cinère, Adrienne Mesurat, Minuit, Le Malfaiteur). The characters whose daily life is empty, struggle to be. Boredom has deprived them of all will power leading them to powerlessness and passivity. Because they look out with disillusionment over a meaningless world, the Greenian characters are condemned to the internalized loneliness of beings compelled to live with themselves. Their life is anguish: the characters are trapped in their body and the bogging down of time. They feel the anguish of emptiness in all their actions and the absence of any future, which becomes a dreadful threat, but they are still aware of their own finitude.