Completed the day before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Celine's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath. Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II.

The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as Celine, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs.