ABSTRACT
Guerard was among the first to consider Gide's fiction from the point of view of its latent psychological content and the way in which it dealt with the author's homosexual inspiration. Critics who exclusively emphasized the book's moral point were misguided, according to Guerard. The story of a man who seeks to throw off the inhibiting shackles of civilization in an attempt to turn himself into a superman, rising beyond good and evil as Nietzsche had proclaimed, is little more than window-dressing behind which is played out a drama of repressed homosexuality. Gide readily admitted the part which symbolic action played. He told Francis Jammes he had spent four years on the book, not writing but living it. The fictional Michel is a latent and frustrated homosexual even after his marriage with Marceline, and is paralyzed by the freedom he has won.
