The two principal axes of inquiry are Malraux's ongoing quest for a dimension of transcendence within human life and, at lest as compelling, his search for the most appropriate and effective means by which to express a changing awareness of just what that dimension might be. Not surprisingly, in a world apparently doomed to languish in the spectral shadow of Death, there are certain constants: a yearning for some fraternity to combat man's essential solitude, a refusal to sink without effort into the vortex of the Absurd, a conviciton that life is to be lived fully and intensely. The human condition is what it is. The ways in which Malraux's characters, and of course Malraux himself, cope with this condition reveal a clear evolution, especially from the 1933 novel La condition humaine onwards. The reader follows Malraux from playful adolescence through the dichotomy of anguish and glorification in his middle years, towards the primarily interrogative utterances of the mature man.
The often frivolous, sometimes sardonic, humour of youth gives way first to a painful recognition of the abyss, then to the discovery of a very tentative equilibrium in the philosophy of metamorphosis espoused by an older Malraux. Andre Malraux: Towards the Expression of Transcendence reveals the principal steps by which Malraux achieved that equilibrium.