Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1334

Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth.

The whole purpose of Man's Hope is to portray the tragic dialectic between means and ends inherent in all organized political violence -- and even when such violence is a necessary and legitimate self-defense of liberty, justice and human dignity.

Nowhere before in Malraux's pages have we met such impassioned defenders of a `` quality of man '' which transcends the realm of politics and even the realm of action altogether -- both the action of Malraux's early anarchist-adventurers like Perken and Garine, and the self-sacrificing action of dedicated Communists like Kyo Gisors and Katow in Man's Fate.

`` Man engages only a small part of himself in an action '' says old Alvear the art-historian ; ;

`` and the more the action claims to be total, the smaller is the part of man engaged ''.

These lines never cease to haunt the book amidst all the exaltations of combat, and to make an appeal for a larger and more elemental human community than one based on the brutal necessities of war.