Reading Order
Vol de nuit Reading Order
Vol de nuit (Night Flight, 1931) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is the novel that made Saint-Exupéry's reputation — a short, intense narrative of a night postal flight over South America and the decisions made by Rivière, the director, who drives his pilots to fly in dangerous conditions and who accepts the death of one of them as the necessary price of establishing that aviation can operate at night. Saint-Exupéry was a professional commercial pilot who flew the early mail routes of the Aéropostale company over the Sahara and South America, and the novel is drawn directly from this experience. Vol de nuit won the Prix Femina (1931) with a preface by André Gide, establishing it immediately as a major literary event. The novel is remarkable for its treatment of professional obligation — Rivière's commitment to the mail schedule above the lives of his pilots is presented not as callousness but as the only form of human greatness available to the administrator. Saint-Exupéry's Terre des hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939) — which won the Prix des Écrivains de langue française and the US National Book Award — is the companion prose memoir.
Where to start
Read Vol de nuit first — it is short (under 150 pages) and can be read in a single sitting; the tension of the night flight and the pilot Fabien's final radio transmissions require sustained reading. Read Terre des hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939) immediately after — it is the prose memoir that gives the autobiographical dimension to the fictional subject matter of Vol de nuit. Courrier Sud (Southern Mail, 1929) is the earlier novel that precedes Vol de nuit in Saint-Exupéry's career.
Complete Vol de nuit Book List
- 1Buy
Vol de nuit
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry·1931·Start here — the night flight and the decision to continue; read in one sitting; Prix Femina, preface by Gide - 2Buy
Terre des hommes
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry·1939·Wind, Sand and Stars — the prose memoir; the autobiographical companion to Vol de nuit; essential immediately after - 3Buy
Courrier Sud
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry·1929·Southern Mail — the first novel; the Sahara mail route; read as the predecessor to Vol de nuit - 4Buy
Pilote de guerre
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry·1942·Flight to Arras — the WWII reconnaissance memoir; the most politically engaged Saint-Exupéry; read after the novels - 5Buy
Le Petit Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry·1943·The Little Prince — the children's book that became the most translated French book; read last; everything in the novels is here in allegorical form
Vol de nuit — Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Rivière and what is his moral position?
Rivière is the director of the South American night mail service — a man who drives his pilots relentlessly, who refuses to allow weather or danger to interrupt the mail schedule, who knows that this will eventually kill some of his pilots and who accepts this as the price of establishing aviation as a reliable form of transport. Gide's preface calls Rivière's position 'nietzschean' — the subordination of individual welfare to a larger purpose — but the novel itself is more ambiguous: Rivière is not cruel, he simply believes that the existence of a regular night mail service is a greater good than any individual pilot's life. The novel asks whether this belief is heroism or inhumanity, and does not resolve the question.
What is the Aéropostale company and why does it matter for the novel?
Compagnie générale aéropostale was the French airmail company (1918–1931) that operated mail routes over the Sahara and South America. Saint-Exupéry flew for Aéropostale from 1926, first on the Toulouse–Dakar route and later in South America, and the company is the direct model for the mail service in Vol de nuit. The company's history — its eventual bankruptcy in 1931, the same year Vol de nuit was published — gives the novel an additional ironic dimension: the establishment of night flying that Rivière forces through at such cost is ultimately in service of a company that fails anyway. The novel was published just as the real Aéropostale was collapsing.
What happens to Fabien and his radio operator?
Fabien is a pilot whose aircraft is caught in a storm during a night flight from Patagonia to Buenos Aires. He climbs above the storm and briefly achieves a moment of extraordinary beauty — flying above the clouds in moonlight — but cannot descend through the storm to land, and his fuel runs out. His final radio transmissions, growing weaker and more distant, are intercut with Rivière's decisions about the mail schedule in Buenos Aires. Fabien and his radio operator disappear; the novel does not describe their death directly, following the Aéropostale convention that missing pilots were presumed lost at sea. The disappearance rather than the death gives the ending its particular quality of absence.
How does Vol de nuit relate to Malraux's novels of political engagement?
Saint-Exupéry and Malraux were contemporaries and share the interwar preoccupation with what Malraux called 'la condition humaine' — the question of what gives human life meaning in the face of death. But where Malraux's novels are political (the Chinese and Spanish revolutions), Saint-Exupéry's are professional and ethical: the question is whether professional obligation (the mail schedule, the regular flight) can provide the same form of meaning that political commitment provides for Malraux's characters. Both are asking what makes it worth dying, but from different vantage points — the revolutionary and the professional aviator.
What is the significance of Gide's preface to Vol de nuit?
André Gide's preface to Vol de nuit was one of the most important literary endorsements of the interwar period — Gide was the dominant figure in French letters at the time, and his imprimatur immediately placed the novel in the first rank of French fiction. Gide praised Saint-Exupéry's moral vision and his prose style, calling the novel 'a book in which one flies, soars, as in a dream, but with a consciousness taut, precise, exacting.' The preface also contains the 'nietzschean' description of Rivière that has influenced all subsequent readings of the novel, and its influence on how Vol de nuit was received was enormous.
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