Jerzy Kosinski's novels lie in the area between the post-war European emotional lucidity and the hip coolness of American mid-generation. His is a non-judgmental, morally permissive fiction, in which action is meant not as salvation, but as making the most of life. In Kosinski's novels, man does not have a character by which he is doomed; he adjusts himself to reality by denying his civilized self and his moral judgment. He forms a personality-free character in a personality-free world.

Kosinski's novels are agitated, ghoulish yarns, told in dispassionate, icy language. They are void of realistic linearity and of emotional temperature. The untitled "chapters" form the unconnected units of narration, space and time are fragmented, little actions follow like digressions, the plotless plot converges rather than continues; words do not burn, as in passionate texts, but are lucid and conniving.

Kosinski's characterless characters have no fixed personalities, yet they do have consistent ego. Like a Pirandellian hero (it was Pirandello who finally got rid of characters, as Joyce did away with recognizably continuous storytelling), the Kosinski protagonist exists from moment to moment. Continually creating himself anew, he never achieves a solidified, hard-core reality of a continuous hero. The story line is the unfinished and unfinishable business of life; thus, it is not accidental that every novel ends inconclusively, with the hero looking out of the window into future spaces.

The narrator/hero appears incognito, blending into other characters, playing in different episodes, enacting the roles of cool manipulators and merciless executioners. His victims are men and women who are thoughtless. Men, totally unmotivated, seek murder. Women, mostly nameless and undefinable, "characterize" themselves by the sexual features of their bodies: glimpses of bare arms, curving thighs, long necks, and sleeveless blouses. They are punished accordingly: caged, abused, raped. Group rape is a frequent device. Protagonists occupy themselves by abruptly slipping into a woman, or literally forcing her open by surprise and blackmail.

Kosinski's first novel (not counting two other works of fiction written under a different name), The Painted Bird, is a parable of a young boy's initiation into evil—he is learning the experience of violence as the all-pervading source of human energy. (pp. 13-14)

The ceaseless monologue in the boy's unaffected language underscores the gruesome, unrelieved instances of human bestiality with the naivete of non-judgmental, heightened realism. In the last section of the book, the boy learns to accept violence as rightful, and desires to identify with the executors of brute force. The Nazi officer with "the smooth, polished skin, bright golden hair and pure mental eyes" and the ballad-singing Red Army comrades become the objects of his admiration…. Having become mentally and physically strengthened by evil, the boy, who had literally lost his speech, regains it on the last page of the book. (pp. 15-16)

While "the other" in The Painted Bird presented the world of a child-victim mutely asking for compassion, Steps, Being There, The Devil Tree, and Cockpit turn to the consistent narrative told by a perpetrator of evil: an addict of violence, a picaro, a sexual outlaw, or a psychopath. In later novels, Kosinski refuses the victimology inherent in The Painted Bird—victims are as evil as criminals. The new "I" narrator is a Nietzschean sinless, aggressive man, acting out of his strangeness (not understood by society) and releasing it in violence. To him, anything is better than stillness. Instead of burying himself alive in neurosis, instead of committing a crime against himself—"a crime" of introspection or self-analysis, Kosinski's protagonist assumes the kingly glory of a criminal. Penetrating the interior from the outside, the hero/narrator merely acts. (Meursault in Camus' Stranger also saw himself only to the extent to which others saw him acting). The irony of this technique is that the "I" narrator, who has been traditionally employed in introspective and speculative texts for the purpose of self-revelation, does not reveal himself to the reader. Thus pointing out the fallacy of introspection, Kosinski demonstrates man's unfathomable, disintegrated nature. (p. 16)

Violence and vengeance, sex and death, power and submission are the essential human ties within the godless and humanless macrocosm of Steps. The neutrally human male is a vagrant, going from place to place, accidentally meeting women, having accidental affairs, and doing away with accidentally chosen victims. He acts like some kind of destructive, fallen angel, if one can conceive of any motivation. Most of the time, however, he is presented as totally impersonal, a thing acting upon a thing. (p. 17)

The acts of coercion and their motions are conveyed through verbs that Kosinski seems to have mastered nearly as well as Ernest Hemingway, but they are employed for very different effects. While Hemingway turned the action of doing ordinary things into a sacred ritual, where even the dinner table or a ship deck became an altar of sacrifice for some unseen gods, the Kosinski protagonist performs the spasms and moans of lovemaking and dying, some kind of dance macabre, a desperate effort of shouting out motion instead of creating emotion. He can never accept death as a necessary pact with nature, an exchange for the gift of life. That is why his deaths are never beautiful: they are not the ordered deaths of the hunted or the hunters, but chilly executions performed by psychopaths for whom only violence can restore their suppleness and vitality. The love acts are, accordingly, not relationships, based on attraction, but the perversions of those who became intimidated about love by rape….

It seems that Kosinski's manner of externalized action has more to do with the language of the movies as adapted by some of our contemporary writers who offer their readers only what is graspable through the cinematic shortcuts to character motivation and the execution of justice. The novel Steps seems to reinforce a 'historical' step taken by director Arthur Penn in the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967), that of elongating the violent, jerky spasms of violence into visual, ballet-like sequences. There has since been, both in films and literature, the determination to show the convulsion, rather than to present the problem. The response the artist expects is that of disinterested curiosity, like the activity of watching a cockroach kicking off its legs under the influence of an insecticide; the consciousness of the character is the consciousness of a creature in convulsion—it expresses the convulsion, the retching, and no more than that. (p. 18)

The occupation of watching, the faculty of voyeurism, takes the form of a major thematic conception in Kosinski's next book, Being There (1970). The novel presents a personable simpleton, called Chance, only a degree removed from caricature. He is a nonentity who achieves eminence and gains political stature by being mistaken for a genius….

In this novel, Kosinski's predilection for the unusual creates a metaphor of American success. On the social level, the novel is a spoof of fame and limitless opportunities arriving instantly for a man whose education has been drawn from relentless television viewing and cultivating his garden. Equipped with an unaffected, naturally poetic perception of reality, Chance disrupts the medium of static, garbled political oration; his words are quoted and applauded internationally, and he is on his way to a spectacular corporate career. The real preoccupation of the book, though, is the presentation of a human puppet who totally identifies himself with the dictates of the media. But here the satirical dimensions of the novel stop. What seems to intrigue the author more is the ungraspable and uncommunicable essence of man. The symbolic use of television is all-important: seeing is all "the other" knows and wants to know about "you." By the same token, it is all "you" want the other to know in order to stay safe. (p. 19)

The irony inherent in Being There is that the author blames Chance for being a mass product, a character whose banality is only an illusion of impenetrability, but, at the same time, all he provides for the reader is exactly the flat TV screen image…. The Kosinski narrator, through whose camera-like eyes the reader observes the world, knows little beyond what is registered on the lens.

The obsession with personal unknowability reappears in The Devil Tree (1973). (p. 20)

In Kosinski's usual manner, letters and conversations, without transitions or quotation marks, are interspersed at random. Different voices speak them, as the author changes the point-of-view from a first-person narrator to the third person. What emerges through the mosaic of the adventurous, swift episodes is a portrait of a young man perplexed by wealth and his hippie philosophy, but unable to enjoy either…. Truer in social reality than Steps, this novel also reveals more insight into the notoriously "unwashed soul" of a Kosinski character. (pp. 20-1)

The calculated adolescent tricks of watching the "other tumble down" and the role-playing devices aimed at threatening others because of one's boredom and restlessness are, in The Devil Tree, balanced by statements that are not just evil responses to the experienced hurts and injustices. The novel conveys some genuine interest in what makes the exiled soul tick and some material that goes beyond the merely destructive energy of Steps. As a matter of fact, the novel resembles the tangled branches of the baobab—the devil tree of the title—the tree condemned to live an underground life of abiding darkness….

As if afraid of exposing his humanity too extensively, in Cockpit (1975) the Kosinski protagonist retreats to his quintessential defenses: sneaky, vile and controlled, he commits violent acts without giving access to the violent emotions behind them. (p. 21)

Role-playing in literature has become a sanctified means of redeeming existence from absurdity. By reversing vices and virtues, by becoming a murderous imitation of an all-powerful God, by pursuing evil instead of evil pursuing him, Tarden [the protagonist] seems to embrace the other Lucifers of modern literature, the "Caligulas" who want to achieve responsibility for the anarchy of existence. But Kosinski's fallen angel is not paying for his knowledge from the tree of evil; the assumptions of absurdity are thus strained. Does he at least learn anything in the process of his evil commitment? He does not. Shifting from one moral stand to another, Tarden perpetuates good and evil alike. (p. 22)

In The Painted Bird, the boy was the victim of the village peasants and their witchcraft rituals. [In Cockpit] the adult assumes the role of sorcerer who shapes the destinies of the others with a touch of his magic rod. But why is the sorcery of The Painted Bird more persuasive than its modern American equivalent in Cockpit? Precisely because the former was rooted in folk superstition and natural phenomena, such as rainbows, birds' nests, rat meals, medicinal knowledge about herbs, and the peasants' appeasement of nature by their bloody rituals. The Painted Bird, with its overtones of myth, totem and taboo, suggests a religious violence, justified by ignorance and superstition. It is as beautiful as a naive, primitive painting, and linked to the cosmos by the fear and reverence of the maleficent powers of nature. In the later novels, the Kosinski protagonist appears armed with tape recorders, electronic doors, needles and radar, the weapons of modern heaven-hell. By these means he distributes death and inflicts torture, destroying incompetent foes for the appeasement of his "existential" identity. The actions performed for self-preservation by the boy's oppressors in The Painted Bird become in subsequent novels a celebration of malice on an organized, calculated footing. The only justification for evil is its irrationality. (pp. 22-3)

The purpose of the literature of evil has always been, if not inverted morality, at least utmost honesty. "A little of 'confessed' evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil," says Roland Barthes in Mythologies. Celine, Gide and Genet were all tireless in presenting all truths—they did not stop at any truth. But they did not omit the torment of evil, the anguish of the sinner's excommunication. The Kosinski of the latest books offers a series of profane snapshots, told in a skimpy, conniving style, and supplying information typical of police and psychiatric files. His intense interest in violence is not accompanied by suffering, that poetry of violence.

As a "vile" Romantic, already acknowledged as a legitimate character of many authors who have declared war on the bourgeoisie, Kosinski is entitled to a denial of tragedy and suffering as useless; the best writers did that. Even Brecht in his Marxist period did not postulate that the conflict of the diseased business ethics of our times and decayed Christian morality was reconcilable through sacrifice. But he convinced us of the existence of a connection between people that goes beyond guilt, by the creation of vivid realities and vivid characters. The writers of the massive masterpieces, such as Balzac, Tolstoy or Melville, as well as authors of existential works such as Camus or Mailer, fleshed out the dangerous realities of consciousness and conscience. They created live people out of the dead matrix of words, endowed them with affective life, supplied them with gestures of desire. Without desire, without ecstasy, without failure purified in death (the death of the rebel, as well as his victim), the literature of cruelty does not restore the reader or renew society's vision. The most nihilistic texts, brimming over with lacerating despair and rage, were informed by emotional fullness. Even when nothing could satisfy the desire, the repetitious pattern of desire sustained the life of the characters, the life of the novels. (pp. 23-4)

[Kosinski's] animated strips contain no emotional coloring except the audacity of aberration and gratification not preceded by desire. They produce a dehydrated, short-lived "theatre," the sadistic peep show, a self-annihilating bluff—in other words, the squalor not transformed into art. From the author of The Painted Bird, a work of narrative density and fiercely exaggerated but poignant imagery of desperation one expects a deeper plunge into the heart of darkness. One wants the artist who both shows and sees. There is a great deal of intuition in presenting the character totally from the outside, as unmotivated and disturbingly unknown to us. That is deeper and deeper. But making him too peculiar, too acrobatic and contorted, means shallower and shallower. Even evil has to be believable. (p. 24)