Self-reflection and ambivalence in Gadda's L'Adalgisa

By means of a close reading of Gadda's short story L'Adalgisa, the article aims to re-discuss the role the self plays in the narrative discourse of Gadda's works. The selected passage displays a diverse range of metanarrative phenomena, the most significant of which is the ‘coming out’ of the narrator as a character who fully intertwines his own subjectivity with that of the protagonist Adalgisa. This subjective turn, occurring exactly in the middle of the text, compels the reader to revise the ambivalent stance of the narrator, until then committed to mocking Adalgisa and, on a higher scale, the bourgeois milieu of pre-war Milan. It is precisely this turn that allows Gadda to overstep the satirical stance of many of his early writings and rework out the most profound tensions and ambivalences at the core of his work.