In the face of an industrializing and urbanizing province, Québec’s provincial government under premier Maurice Duplessis (1936-39 and 1944-59) turned towards the past. The government and the Catholic Church embraced an ideology of clerico-nationalism in order to maintain their status by presenting a nostalgic vision of Québécois life—one that was rural, pious, and insulated from Anglophone influence. However, the urban Québécois had different every-day experiences, often struggling to support themselves by working for the Anglophones who dominated the economy and supported Duplessis in his efforts to crush Francophone unions. Between 1937 and 1977, a wave of authors responded to the Duplessis administration by counteracting the idyllic countrysides exalted by the government with novels that reflected the harsh urban realities facing many Francophones. As Jane Moss has demonstrated, novels written during this time period so often featured characters who were suffering from physical ailments that literary historians refer to these novels as "morbid literature," in which being ill and being Québécois were virtually synonymous. Although morbid novels dominated the 20th-century Québécois literary landscape, they have received little critical attention, with some works, such as André Giroux’s Le Gouffre a toujours soif, being ignored almost entirely. My thesis will examine how illness in Giroux’s novel served as a metaphor for the social ills harming urban Francophones, especially those associated with clerico-nationalism. Particular attention will be paid to the impact of occupational and religious forces in harming the physical, psychological, spiritual, and economic health of the novel’s characters.