SOURCE: "'I'll Protest If It Kills Me': A Reading of the Prologue to Death on the Installment Plan," in Critical Essays on Louis-Ferdinand Céline, edited by William K. Buckley, G. K. Hall, 1989, pp. 180-92.

In the following essay, Burns discusses incongruities between the narrator of Journey to the End of the Night and the narrator of the prologue to Death on the Installment Plan. According to Burns, the later work "is a distinct and separate novel that makes its own demands in order to express its own intentions."

The novel of adventures, the tale, the epic are [an] ingenuous manner of experiencing imaginary and significant things. The realistic novel is [a] second oblique manner. It requires something of the first: it needs something of the mirage to make us see it as such. So that it is not only Don Quixote which was written against the books...