Of Human Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham's autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage is the story of Philip Carey, an orphaned boy with a club foot who over the course of the book struggles through a tortured adolescence and an uncertain adulthood. The story begins when Philip is nine years old and his mother has just died of childbirth. He moves in with his uncle and soon afterward attends boarding school, while later finding occasional employment as a young adult. However, his club foot and sexual frustrations (stand-ins for Maugham's own stammer and homosexuality) lead to a quietly tormented life that is only partially redeemed by an inquisitiveness and a restless desire for travel and new experiences. In the end Philip manages to find a certain form of maturity and self-discovery as he realizes these conflicting emotions are the essence of our existence:

There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip's eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not been so happy for months.

[...]

It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do... He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern -- that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died -- was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

Of Human Bondage is quite long and doesn't always maintain its high quality, but there is an intensity to Philip's experiences (no doubt drawn from Maugham's own) that make it quite powerful and convincing.