Man's Fate

Man’s Fate is the 1933 existential war novel written by French author Andre Malraux. Set during the onset of the Second Chinese Revolution, the story chronicles a pivotal 22-day event in 1927 in which a Communist uprising seeks, but ultimately fails, to revolutionize the world. Told through the eyes of four Chinese protagonists with varying ties to their native country, the story explores war, communism, insurrectionism, conspiracy, sacrifice, martyrdom, existentialism, determinism, and death. Man’s Fate won the Prix Goncourt French Literature Award in 1933, and was listed number five on Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century in 1999.

The story begins in Shanghai, China the night before the communist insurrection in 1927. A national terrorist named Ch’en Ta Erh internally struggles over his imminent assassination of a sleeping soldier. Ch’en then stabs the soldier to death with a dagger and confiscates a shipping document that ensures the delivery of arms to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Reds, Russian communists with a tenuous alliance with Chiang Kai-shek to take Shanghai, need these armaments to fend off government forces and overthrow the city.

Ch’en travels to a record-player shop owned by a Belgian named Hemmelrich. Ch’en delivers the shipping document to Kyoshi Gisors (Kyo), leader of the revolution. Ch’en is cheered by both men, as well as Katow, a Russian revolutionary. Kyo and Katow test their phonographic encryption by playing two records simultaneously. As the first overlays the second, it shrouds key words from being decoded. Content with their work, Kyo and Katow make rounds to the barracks in preparation for imminent battle. Hemmelrich declines, tending to his ill-stricken wife and children instead.



Hours before a planned strike on the Shanghai, Kyo and Katow visit hundreds of battalions. The insurgents target a noontime attack, which includes destroying the railways, overrunning police stations and military posts, confiscating all weapons, and stopping tanks in their tracks via grenades.

Kyo visits the Black Cat nightclub, seeking the aid of French merchant Baron Clappique. Clappique, an alcoholic compulsive gambler, is ordered to visit the harbor and present a forged document that forces an adversarial barge, The Shantung, to alter its anchorage. This will give the insurrectionists a strategic advantage. However, Clappique calls Kyo to inform him that the Shantung has been relocated. As a new plan of attacked is forged, existential crises continue to wear on all four men.

As the novel unfolds, we delve into the minds of these four central characters and witness the psychological unrest and existential angst they endure amid a failed insurrection. For his part, Ch’en becomes so infatuated with death and his desire to murder as a hardened assassin that he can hardly think of anything else. Killing consumes him, which begins to wear on his psyche. Ch’en becomes so tormented by the overwhelming obsession of his own death and the inevitable lack of control he has to avoid it. He would rather die than continue being tortured by this inner turmoil. In the end, during a suicide-bombing attempt on Chiang Kai-shek’s life, Ch’en is killed.



Kyo’s internal struggle comes from his staunch belief that every person should choose their own meaning. This is a kind of existential determinism that advocates shunning external influence and finding significance within. Kyo practices these tenets as he works to keep the power in the hands of the working people, rather than in the KMT. Kyo, while confronting his own internal strife, must reconcile with his philandering wife, May. May is one of the only female nurses in Shanghai, putting her in a position of power. When May has an affair with another doctor, Kyo is forced to confront his turbulent marriage on top of the consequences of the war-torn uprising. In the end, Kyo is captured by opposing forces and in a profound measure of self-determined fate, commits suicide by imbibing cyanide pills.

Witnessing Kyo’s death, Katow ultimately acts in kind. The revolutionary’s previous brush with death in the Russian Civil War has given him a false sense of immortality. Katow even feels psychologically impervious to the horror of war. However, when he sees his fellow insurgents being filed out, one by one, to meet their demise, Katow takes radical action. As he watches his comrades get burned alive in the steam chamber of a locomotive, Katow intends to bypass such a fate by ingesting cyanide. However, in an act of compassion after hearing two Chinese soldiers express fear of being burned alive; he gives the cyanide pills over to them instead. In an act of heroic self-sacrifice, Katow accepts his fate of death by treasonous immolation.

Clappique is the only protagonist to survive. After delivering a shipment of guns on behalf of Kyo, Clappique is told that Kyo will be killed if he does not leave Shanghai in 48 hours. Clappique tries to warn Kyo, but his gambling compulsion sidetracks him along the way. Unable to pry himself away from this vice he calls “suicide without dying,” Clappique also grapples with an inward battle throughout the novel. In the end, Clappique makes a daring escape out of Shanghai by disguising himself as a sailor.



Through the experiences of all four men, Malraux underscores what he deems the “Pascalian aspect,” a kind of deep-rooted pessimism at the heart of the human condition. The inner strife each man deals with in the novel directly relates to this universal feeling, according to Malraux.

Despite these tales of conflicted self-determination, the novel ends with a failed communist takeover of Shanghai. Ironically, in 1949, 16 years after the novel was published, it would be the communist party that seized control over China.

Four motion picture adaptations of Man’s Fate have been attempted, but never realized. Fred Zinnemann was initially attached to direct in 1969; followed by Costa-Gavras in 1979; Bernardo Bertolucci in 1987; and Michael Cimino in 2001.