For a short while he seems to recover his lust for life. Having languished for years without a sense of purpose, Florent-Claude resolves to end his reliance on antidepressants. Indeed, he actually throws out his screen and begins to think again about Thomas Mann, about Proust—about the fate of our civilization. And everything melts away into an all-encompassing void. No mercy, no comfort: the project of our civilization has come to an end. Erratic consumer preferences, capricious fashions, and an unpredictable herd instinct dictate the opinions or the whims and fancies of most of us who no longer have a family, a home, a church, and a nation to reinforce our sense of identity.
Unable to chart a course for ourselves, we are floating around in an empty sea. All control of life—and of who we are—is lost. From disappointment at the lack of an all-embracing cultural ideal, romantic love, meaningful social intercourse to depression. Then, via desperate consumerism and sexual hedonism, to a futile, feeble cry for help into the cosmos. And in Soumission , the West succumbs to the Muslim creed. Actually, God does care about us, he thinks about us all the time, and he guides us, sometimes quite precisely.
These loving impulses that enter into our hearts to the point of suffocation, these illuminations, these ecstasies which cannot be explained by simple biological nature, by our status as primates: these are extraordinarily clear signals. Do I really need to offer up my life for these whingers? Do I really have to be so explicit?
Does he then sacrifice himself and plummet to the ground in a desperate attempt to save us all? Or is it the writer who is speaking here, presenting his oeuvre as an attempt to offer salvation? Perhaps the protagonist remains lying on the sofa in his apartment, crushed, unable even to gather the strength to walk to the open balcony door and hop over the railing?
It is left to the reader to decide. He has a series of relationships, all of which ultimately fail. When he finds out that his current Japanese girlfriend has been going to orgies behind his back, where she has serviced not only groups of other men but even three dogs a pit bull, a boxer, and a terrier, as he specifies rather precisely , he resolves to disappear without a trace.
