The eternal youth in Vitaliano Brancati

Abstract

The essay investigates Vitaliano Brancati's narrative work, beyond any ideological or regionalistic reading, in the light of the dualism between youth and immaturity which characterizes the stories of several characters. Between nostalgia for the past and inability to face the present, Brancati's characters live in a dimension of existential immobility, unaware of adulthood with its seriousness and its duties, seen as intolerable or lacking of meaning, in the crisis of the modern world in which they drag themselves. Don Giovanni lingers on only spoken love; Antonio, in the presence of too 'strong' fathers, experiences the inept inability to assert a new self; Paolo, now an adult, undeterred cultivates the sensuality of his lost years, compulsively sinking into the vortex of lust. The obsessions of their youth, exhibited, concealed, sought after, are unequivocal indications of a profound, unresolved, existential restlessness. Almost unbeknownst to them, the full light of youth has long vanished.