ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the history of readings of the text and indicates the problematics it has given rise to. Claudel was of course right to query the author's commitment. By comparison with the message of his own plays, the ending of La Porte Etroite would strike him as highly ambiguous. Alissa's diary reveals her as achieving neither peace of mind nor any sense of a saving presence. Gide's glossing of the text stands to confirm people's sense of the heroine's error. The same effect is produced if people bring to bear on the recit a knowledge of the whole corpus. Gide scholars will know very well however that a powerful challenge to the notion that the work is fundamentally concerned with religion, was mounted some thirty years ago by Germaine Bree, and they will know that her argument has carried weight with later critics.
