First, and foremost, Moravia is a storyteller and human behavior is at the core of his fictional world. Though at times the writing is tedious, a little contrived, or a little too polished, it is always very much alive. At his best, Moravia emerges as a rare cynical genius who illuminates his world with a penetrating psychic understanding. Indeed, his insights are handled with the depth and subtlety of a master psychologist. As his characters reveal their needs; our own necessities are disclosed. To understand Moravia fully is to lose our "intolerance"; he makes us aware, conscious, knowing. We cannot escape facing the challenge to be compassionate and different. In Moravia's work it is always the individual that counts. (pp. 151-52)

Moravia's view of life emerges as essentially tragic. His great fear is that man has become a machine, an automaton or "thing," more fearful still, a means. "The use of man as a means and not as an end is the root of all evil." He has said, "Man is automatically not to be happy, that is the human situation." However, it is out of this very morbidity, this unflinching courage in portraying man as he is, that Moravia's vision becomes heroic. Faced with the absurdity of life, an absurdity which equals suffering, his characters nevertheless survive. Man can rise above adversity…. Man does not have to be destroyed by circumstances; he has the inner resources to conquer defeat and avoid destruction. Whatever the horrors, man can survive.

Over and over Moravia uses crime and brutality to illuminate man's absurd condition. Violence and crime make man aware of the other extreme he is capable of through love; hence, a higher existence is revealed. Compassion, that capacity to feel sorrow, solidarity, sympathy—to suffer, not only for your own predicament but for that of others—is the key to Moravian love. To be willing to assume the sorrows of others and to suffer because of (and with) others is the challenge which Moravia would demand us to accept. Instead of the old pity and terror of literature, the existentialists present us with anguish and radical solidarity.

Moravia has gone beyond the bleak, sordid vision of [his first novel] Time of Indifference. In subsequent works his perception has deepened and matured. Out of this intense vision we sense a true empathy for the condition of modern man. This growth toward understanding and compassion is that factor which earmarks Moravia's greatness; he has gone beyond the existential nausea of Time of Indifference to existential compassion in the later works.

The author has made the statement that, "The writer's task is to perfect the one problem he was born to understand." Certainly, he himself has taken this task seriously. Over and over in his desolate, gloomy, ironic world, the central theme that emerges is the relationship between man and reality. Further, as Moravia's world is a carnal one, his characters most often establish their own reality through a relationship with the opposite sex. As this is accomplished, all other relationships fall into proper perspective…. Moravia's preoccupation with the sexual motif is not carried to the point of abuse as some critics feel. He, himself, is willing to clarify this motif.

My concentration on the sexual act, which is one of the most primitive and unalterable motives in our relation to reality, is due precisely to this urgency; and the same can be said of my consideration of the economic factor, which is also primitive and unalterable, in that it is founded on the instinct of self-preservation that man has in common with animals … sex in the modern world is synonymous with love.

Who can deny that love is a very frequent subject in the literature of all times and all places? But, someone will say, has love been transformed into sex in modern literature … has it lost the indirect, metaphorical and idealized character it had in the past, and so ended up by being identified with the sexual act? The reasons for this identification are many; the chief one is the decline in the taboos and prohibitions which too often compelled false idealizations of the erotic act in an artificial way.

In this existential framework of Moravia's, the quartet of love, existence, reality, and suffering are irrevocably joined. They interlock, interrelate, overlap; they are interdependent. Without love man does not really exist—"he is a mere dehumanized item of existence." Existing implies a new perception and enlargement of reality. As the struggle to exist (conversion) defeats the forces of nonexistence, nihilism, and absurdity, everything changes. All things are seen in a new way—a new reality emerges. Camus, too, seems to traverse this same path back to life via the absurd and suicide. He would have us jolted from the monotonous pattern of our everyday lives…. A new vision is the beginning of revolt for Camus, as therapeutic in its consequences as conversion is for Moravia.

Moravian reality, as we now understand it, is inextricably linked to love, to compassion; that capacity to feel anguish, solidarity, tenderness, and sympathy. Further, through this love, this compassion, man suffers; not only out of his own predicament but for the predicament of others. He must be willing to assume the sorrows of others—to suffer because of, and with others. This reality is filled with pathos as it is intimately merged with the sense of experience as suffering. It is through love that man suffers. Suffering becomes the contingency of love. Man is exalted through love when he can face this contingency; when he has the courage to commit himself to love even though he knows that this exposes him to the possibility of great suffering. Commitment to love, without the possibility of overlooking the risks, is what makes man, fine, elevated, superior, the overman.

Man establishes the sense of his own identity, his own reality, becomes himself in the most profound terms when he loses himself in a love relationship. As man loves, he transcends the banal, the common, the narcissism of everyday existence; he experiences that which is better than himself. His perception of himself, of objects, of nature, of the world around him becomes valid and meaningful. Through love he suffers, and by suffering he can understand, he can know, he can experience, he can feel, he can act—he is alive.

Reality is coeval with love. As man loves he gains the sense of reality. But love is fleeting, this is the paradox. Man is expelled from the world (reality) through loss of love. He can find ways of loving—never permanently, but he is sustained by the memory of love; hence, exile then return through memory to love. (pp. 152-56)

There is in Luca a long dream passage of exquisite nature imagery [in which a character dreams he is a tree]. This passage might be interpreted as a hymn to the totality of Moravia's life-view. It is, at the same time, a summary of the lyric existential reality. (p. 156)

Like a tree, man, too, springs from the earth and is nurtured by it. Man, his arms raised to the sun, is free—he captures that sense of "aggressive freedom" and "unlimited exploration." He may be limited by the bounds of his own imagination, but Moravia sets him free to exploit these bounds. Man must live his life to the fullness of his freedom and his imagination. In reading this dream passage we feel the rush and joy of life pulsating in our veins, I-Thou.

Moravia is wholeheartedly committed to the writer's greatest task, that of explaining the condition of man in a chaotic universe. From the very start of his literary career Moravia has always asked the fundamental question—how is man to deal with reality? How is he to conduct himself in a world which has become "dark and unplumbable—worse still, had disappeared"? To that singular problem Moravia addressed himself in his first novel and continues the quest to this day with a deepening understanding of man's predicament. Propelled by this quest he endeavors to give us as complete a picture of man as possible. And always, the cause and cure of problems must be found in man's inner self. As if he were born to write endless variations on one story, his style is persistent. Persistence of style—that is the existential equivalent to the old "character."

Moravia comes to grips with the torments, the pettiness, the emptiness, and the hollowness which plague contemporary humanity. He does feel compassion for man's lot and he has intimate knowledge, through personal deprivation, of man's suffering. And the perceptiveness and penetration with which he delineates man's suffering is a measure of this radical solidarity. He opts, finally, for love, but like the older Mediterraneans he knows that Eros, as Hesiod wrote, breaks the bones. He is able to stand this risk. He instructs us that if man is to sustain himself in a brutal society he must do so by love—a total commitment to another human being. Moravia speaks to us of ourselves. He is truthful, he is authentic. Is not authenticity the highest praise we can accord any artist in these times or, for that matter, any man? (pp. 158-59)