been chosen neither for the eccentricities of their own thinking nor for the exceptional interest of the things they have to tell about but for their unusual good faith and shrewdness in interpreting everyday experiences. This good faith and shrewdness are carefully established by virtue of certain stylistic mannerisms.

Most evident among these mannerisms are those meant to assure a frank and intimate tone in the narration. The first sentences of stories often seem to come in the middle of a conversation between old friends and may even feign to presuppose on the reader's part some prior knowledge of the material about to be presented, as though there remained only to explain the exact manner in which things had occurred. These two beginnings may be taken as examples:

Era più forte di me, ogni volta che conoscevo una ragazza, la presentavo a Rigamonti e lui, regolarmente, me la soffiava. . . .

Fate caso alle età; fino a trentacinque anni ero vissuto con mia sorella Elvira che ne aveva trentotto . . .

It is as though the narrator had already communicated the essential facts and were now about to proceed, perhaps at the request of his listener, to a fuller presentation of the story. Midway through their accounts, narrators often address their listeners directly, saying "E notate," "Avete visto," or, most characteristically, "Vedete un po' com'è fatto l'uomo." They are forever appealing, one man of the world to another, to his mundane knowledge of human types and habits: "[era] uno di quei piccoli che si vendicano della piccolezza spadroneggiando e facendo i prepotenti." The confidential remark "Si sa come vanno queste cose" is ubiquitous, while shifts and swerves of the narration are habitually punctuated with such informal, easygoing expressions as "basta" and "insomma."

One of the narrators, a waiter, states, in terms which might apply to nearly all of them, that he is of an observant spirit, having found that life is as amusing as a show. All of them reveal the intensity of their interest in psychology inadvertently, as it were, by frequent indulgence in sententiae and citing of proverbs. These formulas are often found at the beginning of a story, where they serve to indicate the precise area of its psychological interest:

Quando in una compagnia di amici entra una donna, allora potete dire senz'altro che la compagnia sta per sciogliersi e ognuno sta per andarsene per conto suo.

There may be instead a rhetorical question which serves the same purpose: "Se ne dicono tante sull' amicizia, ma, insomma, che vuol dire essere amico?" In the first sentences of other tales, e.g. "Quant'è caro," a narrator warns that the facts which he has to recount will seem to contradict a proverb. The main body of the narration also abounds with general statements about human nature. Some of the original ones are rich with imagery:

Eh, è più difficile assai non essere invidioso dell'amico fortunato che generoso con quello sfortunato. E l'invidia è come una palla di gomma che più la spingi sotto e più ti torna a galla e non c'è verso di riccaccierla nel fondo.

This image, like most of the psychological ones, is essentially intellectual, in that it means to explain a mental process by analogy with a physical one.

Being scrupulously objective—albeit fascinated—observers, the narrators are anxious to present all germane details for the reader's and, it seems, their own, reflection. Sharing Balzac's celebrated opinion that temperament and mood are reflected in one's exterior appearance, they present a sort of psychophysical description of principal characters, recalling, for example: "Notai che ci aveva lo sguardo torbido e il viso assorto e che rosicchiava l'unghia dell'indici: segno in lui di preoccupazione." When they do not report conversations directly, they are careful nevertheless to do so in such a manner as to evoke exact words and expressions:

Poi, all'uscita, mi spiegò che lei mi aveva notato da un pezzo, dal giorno si può dire che era stata assunta all'albergo. Che da allora non aveva fatto che pensare a me. Che adesso sperava che le volessi un po' di bene, perché lei, senza di me, non poteva vivere.

If the phrase "mi spiegè che" and its subordinate "che" were removed, this passage would be a fine example of the realistic narrative procedure called "free indirect style," whose first systematic use in literature is often attributed to Flaubert but which, as any observant listener knows, is adopted instinctively by all good oral story-tellers. Moravia's narrators also faithfully report their own moods and reactions and sometimes even puzzle as objectively over the possible motives of their own actions as over the deeds of others.

It is not unusual, in fact, for protagonists to confess themselves unable to understand their own behavior or that of other characters. Their accounts are sprinkled with the expressions "Non so perché" and "Chissà perché." While such frankness and modesty work, of course, to increase verisimilitude, they also testify to the seriousness and to the nearly professional competence of the narrators' speculations. Their failures to understand do not normally appear as signs of naïveté but rather as evidence of a real, if limited, sophistication. These unlettered Romans have become sophisticated about human nature through their habit of observation and also through their attention to the popular wisdom of proverbs. Their perplexity is the sort which comes to wise men, and smiles it may evoke are appreciative rather than indulgent. The whole effect of their tales might be compared to that of an illustrated book of maxims in which were included a good number of situations to which no maxims seem to apply.

In creating narrators who are at the same time unlettered and, in their way, sophisticated, Moravia was breaking almost new ground. This is not to say, of course, that there have not been other proletarian narrators who were meant to be taken seriously. Camus' Meursault is a recent example to the contrary. This humble hero's understanding of events is, however, more instinctive than analytic and the tragic substance of his thoughts hardly invites reasonable interpretation. The writer has been able to find a really close literary relative of Adriana only in our own Huck Finn. Like her, he seldom thinks directly about the social questions which his adventures evoke, though his marginal thoughts are full of grave implications. Also like her, he is extraordinarily well-acquainted with the laws of human nature and unusually perspicacious in his diagnosis of concrete psychological situations. Huck has, of course, an entirely different sense of humor—perhaps a typically American one—but there is a basic similarity of narrative attitudes and techniques.

The protagonists of the Racconti are even more unusual in that they are set to telling only of such matters as they understand—at least in the measure that such matters can be understood. It is as though the author, having noted the success of Adriana in presenting certain subjects, had decided to let his next Romans concentrate upon doing what she had done best. No one narrator becomes very well-known and the areas of his weakness, unlike those of Adriana, remain hidden and irrelevant. The result is the appearance in literature of a novel breed of popular intellectuals whose manner of presentation is more intimate than that of an omniscient author and whose language is both simpler and more inventive than that of the usual narrator with a literary education. Their observations about human nature are not, of course, very new or very surprising, the subject being ancient and well-worked. What is new and surprising is their ingenuous gift of expression, well exemplified in the imaginative sententia quoted above. Much of the tales' appeal derives, too, from the narrators' success in assuming the tone of intimate conversation. Speculation about an interesting subject is always more pleasant in the company of another interested person, and it is not for nothing that the narrators are made to seem eager to share their reflections and their perplexities. Their personalities are so well adapted to the subject matter of their stories that they would plainly be less talented for speculation either about social conditions or about man's lot in the universe. After letting them recount over a hundred tales illustrative of the peculiarities of human nature Moravia may well consider that they have exhausted their startling but well-defined talents. It would not be very risky to predict that his next works, having different preoccupations, will depend upon a different kind of narrative device.