Changing Perspectives on Thought and Action in Andre? Malraux's Major Novels

Abstract

Malraux has expressed his ideas concerning thought and action in many forms. He has explored the conflict between thought and action through various characters on both personal and political levels. He has evaluated "pure" thought and "pure" action through his fictional personages, and he has, in the case of those figures devoted to a life of action analyzed their motivations in great detail. The resulting picture, as seen in the major novels, is extraordinarily diverse and appropriately bewildering. He has chosen, as his medium, human conflict, in the form of insurrection and revolution. For it is in the face of death, both the giving and taking of it, that the dichotomy of thought and action is of the utmost and can be most dramatically presented. . . . Is there, then, a solution to the problem of thought and action as originally laid out in La Tentation de L'Occident? Apparently not,for no one resolution is possible to the many aspects of a problem which Malraux has so vividly illuminated in Les Conquerants, La Condition humaine and L'Espoir. Through the sheer depth of his insight, however, Andre Malraux has made a lasting contribution to contemporary man's knowledge of himself in the realm of one of the most basic problems that confront him. [From Conclusion]