Strait Is the Gate by André Gide
Published 1909 · 28,500 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Strait Is the Gate to read?
Strait Is the Gate scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Gide writes in classical French that translates into formal, literary English. The vocabulary reflects the Protestant bourgeois milieu and the religious preoccupations of the characters.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Sentences are controlled and elegant, building through Jérôme's reflections on his failed love. Gide's prose is readable but carries the weight of spiritual questioning.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- The novel explores the tension between human love and religious devotion, the dangerous attractiveness of renunciation. These abstractions are embodied in Alissa's choice to reject Jérôme.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- The emotional history of Jérôme and Alissa, their letters and encounters, create intimate density. Gide builds his portrait through the accumulation of charged exchanges.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Jérôme narrates, but his understanding of Alissa's motivations may be incomplete. Her journal, included at the end, provides another perspective that complicates his account.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The strait gate of the title—the narrow path to salvation—becomes symbolic of Alissa's terrible choice. The garden and the letters become symbols of love sacrificed.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Gide maintains complex irony toward Alissa's renunciation—is it holiness or pathology? The novel sees beauty in her sacrifice while questioning whether it was necessary or good.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Alissa dies without the union she and Jérôme might have had. The novel refuses to resolve whether her sacrifice was meaningful or tragically mistaken.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Jérôme's narrative is supplemented by Alissa's journal, which provides a counter-perspective. The structure is accessible, building toward the revelation of what Alissa never said.
How Strait Is the Gate is regarded
Strait Is the Gate holds a literary regard score of 67 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.