La lutte de donner un sens à la vie dans "Les Thibault" de Roger Martin Du Gard

The aim of our study is to analyze the struggle of giving a meaning to life in the novel The Thibaults, written by Roger Martin Du Gard. The Thibaults is a river-novel that consists of eight separate novels written under the influence of literary movements realism and naturalism, also bears the characteristics of its genre. In the novel that we are examining, the story is told through the members of a bourgeois family living in the early twentieth century. The author deals with the political environment and the situation of French society before the First World War while including the religious antagonisms, differences between socio-economic classes and differences of opinion of the period. This novel gains a psychological dimension in adding to the experiences of different characters and their emotional states in response to these experiences. Depressions caused by illness, war and death experiences, human achievements such as friendship and love from which every reader can find something from themselves constitute the main themes of this work. In the light of the events that take place around the main characters Jacques and Antoine, who are very different by nature, we observe the struggle to give a meaning to life.