La porte étroite [Strait is the Gate] by Andre Gide (1909)

​Heart-wrenching. Written in typical Gidean fashion: the account—resembling a confession—is written by the first-person protagonist Jerome, who writes from his memories (he warns us that it may be in piece and irretrievable at parts), permitting the careful reader to read into what Jerome may be unwittingly revealing about himself.
 
With his mother and the caretaker, Jerome spends his summers as a child at the home of his uncle Bucolin in Fongueusemare, near Rouen, where there are three cousins around his age and his troublingly beautiful aunt. His aunt, a creole and an orphan, is a stranger, a (sexually) unsettling influence in his uncle’s household; she is incomprehensible by their protestant mores.
 
It is his aunt that provides the impetus for him to love his oldest cousin Alissa, when, one day, Jerome catches a glimpse through wide open doors into a monstrous scene: his aunt laying down on a sofa with his younger cousins Robert and Juliette at the foot, shrieking in laughter at an unknown young man in lieutenant’s uniform, who is screaming “Bucolin! Bucolin! If I had a sheep, I’d surely name it Bucolin.” Jerome goes upstairs to Alissa’s room, where she is praying, covered with tears. Jerome remarks that “that moment decided my life; even today I am unable to remember it without anguish… I felt intensely that this distress was too much for this small trembling soul, for this frail being shaken with tears” (p. 25). He calls on God and offers himself up to protect Alissa; it is a Christian love that he feels for Alissa, a love motivated by pity.
 
His aunt soon leaves with the young man and deserts the Bucolins. The sermon at the local chapel after her elopement addresses the event with a meditation on the words of Christ, imploring those to enter by the strait gate:
 
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
 
The terrible eruption of joy, his aunt’s shrieking of laughter is for Jerome the wide gate that leads to destruction; instead, Jerome endeavours to find the strait gate that leads to life. This “austere instruction” (p. 30) towards virtue finds a ready soul in Jerome, who had been shaped from an early age with the puritan work ethic. Alissa is motivated by the same pursuit of virtue, although Gide subtly points out their paths are divergent: for Jerome, the strait gate leads to Alissa; for Alissa, the path to God can only be walked alone.
 
The two grow older; Jerome pursues his university studies in the Ecole Normale. Jerome and Alissa continue with their love through letters; through this disembodied medium their souls achieve a purity of communication. Their meetings in person, few and infrequent, are maladroit, the fleshly form is an awkward and improper vehicle to express their lofty and ideal love.
 
“Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold,” as the Robert Frost poem goes; Strait is the Gate is also a bildungsroman of sorts, a meditation on ephemeral youth. As Jerome pursues his youthful pursuit of virtue, embodied in an idealized Alissa, Alissa recognizes her postlapsarian decline.
 
“It was nothing but a phantom that I cared for; the Alissa that I had loved, that I still loved, was no more. … Yes, no doubt we had grown old! This frightful depoetization which had chilled my very heart, was nothing, after all, but a return to the natural course of things… if out of her I had made myself an idol, and adorned it with all that I was enamoured of, what now remained to me as the result of my labours but my fatigue?” (p. 145)
 
Alissa’s love for Jerome holds steadfast, and takes on a self-sacrificial form—their divergent ideas about the path toward virtue re-emerge. For Alissa, the strait gate can only be passed through alone; Alissa sees herself an obstacle to Jerome’s attainment of virtue, and thus fades away to death, alone, in an unfamiliar and unadorned white-walled hotel room in Paris. (We hear Alissa’s unfiltered perspectives through her journal, which was entrusted to Jerome in her will. In an interview I read, Hong Sang-Soo said that he read Andre Gide every single day in his twenties—or something to that effect, anyways—Hong Sang-Soo also offers access to the woman’s perspective in several of his films, e.g., Oki’s Movie.)
 
To return to the words of Christ, from which the novel finds its title: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
 
Gide writes the story with a cruel and understated irony. Jerome’s aunt is languorous, sensual, and pursues bodily pleasure; she represents those who pass by the wide gate—she is a most un-protestant character. Meanwhile, the narrow road toward virtue—toward everlasting life—expresses itself as a complete rejection of natural, life-affirming human instincts (of the Greeks, as Nietzsche would comment); it is a complete denial of the corporeal and the flesh; in Alissa’s case, it leads to her death. (Of course, even the most forceful self-abnegation hides a will to power, as Nietzsche shows in his analysis of the ascetic in third essay of The Genealogy of Morals; Gide undoubtedly knows this.) Despite their profound love for one another, Alissa and Jerome are never able to find happiness together, so bound are they to the narrow path, to the ever-constant striving toward virtue. “A little less proud, and our love had been easy…” (p. 145)—happiness was well within their grasp.
 
Strait is the gate… is the narrow path really the road that leads to life?
 
The ending: shadows blanket the present and revivify the past, overwhelming those burdened by memory.

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