George Bataille is a French postmodern novelist who is profane, promiscuous, and drunk. His novels exemplify all kinds of vices. The women are treated with absolute blasphemy and he maintains many ties to promiscuous whores.

The main characters in his novel are Tropman and a woman named Dirty. The novel is set in three places, and those are London, Barcelona and Germany. The novel is a caricature of pathetic irony and signifies existential nihilism. What I find surprising in the novel is that none of the character’s sexual escapades reach a dizzying height of poetic sublimity. The novel evokes a chaotic and anarchic pathos.

Tropman is drunk most of the time and prostituting himself. He is questionable if he gets existential pleasure. Tropman can be thought of as Camus’s myth of Sisyphus, where the gods condemn Sisyphus to roll a boulder up a hill only to find that he rolls back down again. Sisyphus forced to do the same act over and over again. The novel cannot be considered as a masterpiece of art. The novel takes little account of the prevailing political climate in the places. We all know that a revolution is boiling in Barcelona. The novel can be considered as Nietzsche’s Dionysian because it contains violence, sadism, drunkenness and orgies. Is the novel a modern celebration of a defeated hero like Don Quixote?

Tropman is a tragic hero who wants to escape the realities of his family and his life. The novel is a literature of the abyss. Irony is a pathological symptom and has been used as a neurotic metaphor. The novel symbolizes the degradation of the human mind. There is no moving catharsis in the novel. You feel depressed when you read the novel. The novel is the result of a lunatic mind caught up in the fetish of sadistic and masochistic narcissism. None of the characters in the novel is happy. For Battle brothels were considered temples. Battle is a prodigal son who never returns to his father. The novel is sickeningly pathological and neurotic. There is neither the wealth of literature nor the beauty of prose. The novel is written in simple, everyday language. The characters suffer from the poverty of their minds. The novel is symptomatic of a pathological cultural disease. The self becomes a dialectical machine trapped in the neurotic delirium of repressed passions. The novel is a carnival of narcissism. Beliefs and value systems collapse into an abyss. The representation of the characters in the novel is myopic. We are caught in the deluge of a meaningless passion.