It is undeniable that The Immoralist by André Gide, first published in 1902 in an edition of 300 copies, is at least a novel that deals mainly with Michel, the protagonist, and his search for his true authentic self among social and moral conventions and the resulting consequences of deviating from these principles. It is also undeniable that this is a novel that chronicles Michel's journey from a married heterosexual to a widowed homosexual. Throughout the novel Gide uses ambiguous homoerotic references to create a powerful juxtaposition of themes. The two themes collide to give the reader the complex task of ascertaining exactly how much of Michel's quest is a momentous quest for a deeper understanding of his identity and how much is a disastrous façade undertaken to entertain his obvious but discreet homosexual inclination. presented to Michel during his honeymoon in a self-proclaimed loveless marriage with Marceline. He subsequently fights tuberculosis and emerges victorious with the will to live; this is where we see the beginning of Michel's latent homosexuality in his obsession with local Arab boys. Michel insists that his assiduity towards the boys is simply an attraction for their health. He observes at a certain point: "when he laughed he showed his brilliant white teeth, then he joyfully licked the wound: his pink tongue like a cat's. How healthy he was! This was what fascinated me about him: his health. The health of that little body was beautiful." The sexual tone is defined... an indistinct, vague, yet pedantic reference, hidden in the layers of Michel's self-deception. This formless sexuality remains constant throughout the novel, just as Michel continually oscillates between his love and devotion for Marceline and his desire to be free. Michel continues with the rebirth of his new self as he abandons all previous social contracts and begins the steady annihilation of his life. character as well as his marriage to Marceline. What arises from this "rebirth" is a literary dilemma for the reader. Michel denounces his current heterosexual principles, but fails to choose a new, enlightened, homosexual self with which the reader can identify. In a critical essay on this topic, Rictor Norton argues that "Marceline is partly a symbol of society at large and partly the tragic figure of a woman who marries a homosexual man.... Readers simply reject her; because Gide has omitted All the homosexual facts of the narrative, we do not see that Michel rejects it in favor of something or someone else".