Told in the first person and based on his own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa and in America, where he worked for while at the Ford factory in Detroit, and later as a young doctor in a working class suburb in Paris, it gives a picture of those years as seen by an underdog. Celine"s disgust with human folly, malice and greed comes over in superb portraits of mainly ordinary human beings coping with their lives as best they can, caught in their poverty or their obsessions, hindered by ignorance and prejudice from evading traps of their own making.