La Porte étroite Reading Order

La Porte étroite (Strait Is the Gate, 1909) by André Gide is one of his most formally perfect works and the most direct embodiment of his lifelong argument with Protestant asceticism — the story of Jérôme and Alissa, childhood sweethearts whose love is prevented not by circumstance or opposition but by Alissa's own religious conviction that love must be renounced for God. The title comes from the New Testament: 'Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able' (Luke 13:24). Alissa's Protestant severity interprets this as requiring the renunciation of earthly love — including her love for Jérôme — in favor of a spiritual perfection that she pursues through her diary, which is discovered and read by Jérôme after her death. The novel is narrated by Jérôme looking back, and the two perspectives — his memories and her diary — create an irony that is the novel's great achievement: we see a love that was genuine and could have been happy systematically destroyed by a religious interpretation that Gide presents as both admirable and fatal. Gide himself grew up in a Protestant household of great strictness, and La Porte étroite is simultaneously a portrait from inside (he understands the religious logic) and a critique from outside (he sees what it destroys). The novel was published the same year as L'Immoraliste, and together the two novels represent the two poles of Gide's moral argument.