a summary also points out the error of definingThe Leopard as a traditional historical novel. Historical events take place in the story’s background, whereas the protagonists experience the resulting sociopsychological changes in their daily existence. The marriage of Tancredi and Angelica is the most prominent example, the first union of blood and money, aristocracy and nouveaux riches. Others are less dramatic but equally significant: the entrance of former peasant Sedàra in a tuxedo; a lowering in public respect for Don Fabrizio when he demonstrates excessive, nonfeudal friendliness; the switch from the Red Shirt of the guerrillas to the uniform of the regular Piedmontese army; and an offer the prince receives to become a senator in a constitutional parliament.

Issues and themes

While history moves in the novel’s background, historical discussion dominates the foreground. Don Fabrizio’s conversations often enter into current affairs, touching on many of the issues crucial to postunification Italy: the failure of the ideals of the Risorgimento because of personal egotisms and mismanagement; the impossibility of channeling the southern part of the peninsula into a modern, progressive, and democratic state; and the continuing class divisions. Salina, as the voice of Lampedusa, judges history negatively. One king replaces another; one government is substituted for another, while people continue to live and die. Things change and remain the same. The prince’s vision of history is not new; rather, it continues a tradition of humanistic pessimism. The actions of human beings are interpreted as futile; the destinies of individuals are insignificant in the eternal flow of time, which they are impotent to alter or stop.

A symbol of this impotence and history’s indifference to the individual is Sicily, where millennia of political shifts and invasions have had little influence on the people, who reject the possibility of real change and choose apathy, desiring immobility or, more exactly, death. Sicily, as a landscape and a state of mind, dominates The Leopard. In fact, the novel presents two Sicilies: on one hand, the exquisitely beautiful and sensuous land of sea, sun, vegetation, and overpowering scents; on the other, the arid, desolate interior of hunger and pain. The light and the dark Sicilies are actually the same Janus-land of the mind, with its inherent dichotomies. Life, with its vigor, hides the promise of death. The natural settings in the novel possess dual personalities, such as the garden of chapter 1, the olfactory excesses of which denote this complementary contradiction of death in life—the musky perfume of the roses mingling with the acrid stench of the decaying corpse of a Bourbon soldier. Lampedusa’s Sicilian landscapes are signs not of a specific time or object but of the human condition, outside historical demarcations, in which an eternal and indifferent Nature (Fate) engulfs all.

Don Fabrizio explains the Sicilian tendency toward violence or its opposite, apathy, as a desire for immobility, which is another synonym for death. The attraction and pursuit of death is a constant theme throughout The Leopard, from its very first sentence: “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.” (“Now and in the hour of our death. Amen.”) The truncated Latin quotation from the conclusion of the Hail Mary initiates a long meditation on death and dying on the part of both the main protagonist and the narrator. As in his description of Sicily, the author offers a dual image of death: It can be ugly and repellent but also serene and spiritual. Don Fabrizio regularly encounters the former while courting the latter. Painfully aware of the presence of death in all living things, he is nevertheless attracted to its promise of never-ending tranquillity. It is this perpetuity he seeks in the stars, distant and all-powerful yet subject to his calculations.

Astronomy is Don Fabrizio’s occupation but also his bond with something greater than his own mortality. The search for continuity in a transient world likewise underlies the protagonist’s attachment to his homes and lands, to the pride in traditions and the desire to preserve himself and the ancestral past in his descendants. When death comes for Salina, it is in the guise of a beautiful woman inviting possession. However trite, the image once again links vitalism and annulment in a sensual union typical of the novel. The positive elements of life are also expressed in sensory terms, ranging from eroticism to the joys of the table and the pleasures of the hunt.

Love in The Leopard is primarily instinct, as embodied in the feral beauty of Angelica and in the fountain representing a lustful Neptune embracing a willing Amphitrite, an effigy that evokes melancholy regret in the prince. What distinguishes him from the youthful lovers is not a lesser attachment to the joys of life but a greater knowledge of the inherent temporality of all matter. At the ball, he waltzes with the charming Angelica and loses his mature awareness in the pleasure of the music and her young body, yet a few minutes earlier he had been contemplating a mournful painting representing a deathbed scene, meditating on his own inevitable demise. Attracted to the handsome young couple, he nevertheless pities them, for they are doomed to disappointment and awareness similar to his own. The knowledge of the ephemeral nature of life animates Lampedusa’s fictional universe. Everything is destined to disappear, to flow into nothingness, for everything contains the seed of mortality.

Style

What saves The Leopard from maudlin sentimentality or elegiac pessimism is the constant presence of an omniscient narrator who balances the novel’s lyricism with an infusion of irony and comedy. The author conducts an ongoing dialogue with his audience—filling in gaps, making pungent asides, shifting times from the narrated past to the narrating present—remembering, commenting, informing, judging, and involving. This is only one aspect of a relatively complex style employed by Lampedusa in his novel, which has been declared a fragmentary book by some critics, whereas others have compared it to a film montage. The text does present a variety of voices and tones. From the traditional historical novel, it borrows a fairly straightforward third-person narrative—realism if not naturalism—that includes descriptions and dialogue depicting the environment, events, and characters.

Because the novel is also a psychological study, a Stendhalian attempt to narrate through the eyes and viewpoint of a protagonist, Lampedusa experiments with the interior monologue, moving the plot forward through mental rather than temporal associations. To complete the stylistic picture, there is a strong lyric vein present in the author’s descriptive passages and meditations. Structurally, The Leopard’s chapters are somewhat uneven, a roughness caused in part by Lampedusa’s death before the book was accepted for publication; it can be presumed that some changes would have been made. It is known that the novelist had doubts about introducing the chapter centering on Father Pirrone’s visit to his peasant family, although it does function as a lower-class version of the Tancredi-Angelica love story. Other inclusions have been challenged as well: The romance is overextended, detracting from the main character; the death of Don Fabrizio is superfluous and somewhat banal; the epilogue serves no valid purpose in the plot development. Binding together all the chapters of The Leopard are the recurring voice of the omnipresent narrator—his humor, irony, and consciousness collecting all the disparate threads of his tale—and, on a more thematic level, an unrelenting sense of loss.

Lampedusa’s novel resembles a threnody that not only sings the pleasures and beauty of life but also remarks on their evanescence. Nothing survives the corrosive passage of time, a fact known through the comments of the narrator if not through the development of the plot. Nothing is truly immortal in this fictional universe; the author takes pains to inform his readers of the loss of emotions, people, ideals, and places. For example, Angelica and Tancredi’s brief season of sensual love changes into an unsatisfactory marriage and a series of adulterous affairs, a fate shared by Father Pirrone’s plebeian niece and her virile hunk; the Salina descendants grow to resemble the children of the Sedàras and other hyenas and jackals rather than their ancestors, the lions and leopards; members of the middle class, in turn, lose their survival skills and take on the vulnerability of the aristocracy, the price paid for gentrification; the numerous children of Don Fabrizio are reduced to three old maids collecting false relics; the beautiful palaces are sold or destroyed by bombs in World War II. Even strong emotions, such as Concetta’s repressed hatred for her father, dissolve in time, losing all consistency.

What remains is a painful state of lucid awareness that unites the maturing prince, the old Concetta of chapter 8, and the pervasive narrator, creating skepticism and impotence. It is not incidental that Don Fabrizio allows his wealth to be siphoned off as he observes the disintegration of his class and the decay of his family with mixed feelings of loss and vindication. It is the same desire for immobility—or death—that afflicts his Sicily. Don Fabrizio suffers from alienation, not only from the common people but also from his own caste, and estrangement from his environment and family: anger at his wife’s neurotic possessiveness, an autocratic detachment from his children, displeasure with the pettiness of the nobility. He searches poignantly for absolutes on which to base his existence: The aristocracy subsists as an ideal, although individual aristocrats are judged as inept, boring, unintelligent, even unattractive inbred “monkeys”; the family heritage is venerated but is reduced to his pompously silly heir; the stars are a symbol of an idealized death, but the reality of death is a carload of butchered animals and dirty sheets.

In this context, Don Fabrizio is brother to the existentialist heroes—or antiheroes—found in the pages of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Luigi Pirandello, and Søren Kierkegaard, men possessed of the human angst of having been born and “being” for death. It is a realization that occasionally produces reactions of disgust or Sartrean nausea for the act of living. But the prince, like Lampedusa’s text itself, is a complex creation whose cosmic pessimism is moderated by an instinctual passion for life and a spiritual quest for eternity, however dubious.

Were the novel to conclude with the ball episode (as chosen by Visconti for the finale of his brilliant film rendition), which ends with the vision of the morning star, promising Don Fabrizio a rendezvous with eternal truth, or with the death of the protagonist, with its erotic suggestions of union with Death as Beauty, Lampedusa would have left his text open to positive interpretations. However, the episode dated 1910 destroys these hopeful readings. Little is left of the aristocracy, the Salina family, or the prince’s memory. The youths have aged or died, becoming cynical, childlike, or hardened. As they ironically prepare to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Garibaldi’s invasion, Concetta is forced to meditate on the past, only to recognize that it was her own thoughtless pride rather than her father’s opposition that destroyed her chance to marry Tancredi. This realization shatters her interpretation of the past and nullifies the ancient resentments and emotions that had sustained her.

The narrator comments on the unknowability of truth as Concetta prepares to dispose of her personal history, emptied of any true vital involvement. The objects in her old-maid’s room speak of a time no longer present and of a life ill spent: family photographs, the locked trunks of her dowry filled with musty linens, and the remnants of the beloved dog Bendicò, his carcass transformed into a rug. Lampedusa’s final image is poetically powerful and thematically relevant: Concetta’s maid throws out the mangy hide, which takes on the shape of a dancing quadruped, cursing with his right paw, before it decomposes into a pile of ashen dust. It is a final sign of decay, loss, and death: the last leopard.