Zeno’s Conscience: summary of all the chapters of Italo Svevo’s novel that marked Italian literature, with important characters and events.
Zeno’s Conscience: Chapter Summary
Zeno’s Conscience – Chapter 1: Smoke
Zeno begins to smoke to compete with his father, with whom he has never had a good relationship. However, he becomes convinced that smoking could seriously damage his health, and decides to quit, but “he will spend the rest of his life smoking his last cigarette”.
Unfortunately, no one can cure him of his vice, so he asks for help from a specialized clinic, from which he runs away the next day. In this situation, Zeno places smoking as the very cause of his congenital disease, so he tries to get rid of it, but ends up unconsciously hiding behind it, with the fear that if he stopped smoking his illness would not go away, so he would have to convince himself that he himself was the cause of his illnesses; therefore, he preferred to pretend to want to quit.
Zeno’s Conscience – Chapter 2: My Father’s Death
The chapter begins with the memory of the parent, followed closely by the narration of the events from his last conversation with his father until his death. The last conversation, which, unfortunately for Zeno, fails to make either of the two “factions” express their feelings towards the other, even if they were already known about one. Zeno wakes up the next morning and already finds his father different from usual, a feeling that will be confirmed later, when he discovers that his father is ill.
Because of the delirium and unconsciousness of the latter, he is unable to communicate his true feelings to him, while his father succeeds in this, who, at the moment of death, raises his hand “high high” and slaps him. Everyone talks about a mechanical reflex, but Zeno will carry the memory of that slap with him forever. The disappearance of his father represented, in fact, the disappearance of the concrete antagonist with whom he could measure himself in order to highlight his own abilities. The remorse for his father’s death is seen by Zeno as a further increase in his illness.
Zeno’s Conscience – Chapter 3: The Story of My Marriage
Zeno, for business, meets Mr. Malfenti, with whom he gets on good terms, and is then invited to his house, where he meets his four daughters, of whom the most beautiful seems to him to be Ada, with whom, however, he behaves rather awkwardly, and is therefore rejected. He then speaks about it with Mrs. Malfenti, but this situation does nothing but drive him away from his colleague’s house, where he will return after five days. Returning, then, to the house of his beloved, he meets her with Guido Speier, who at that moment is playing the violin, and Zeno does not miss the opportunity to make a bad impression. “By chance”, he marries Augusta, one of Ada’s sisters, whom he does not love, but who loves him. In fact, he will have to fall back on Augusta, as he had behaved rather awkwardly with the first.
Before the wedding, Zeno clearly declares this to her, but she agrees anyway. In this chapter, Zeno feels a bit like a victim of chance, which prevents him from marrying the woman he loves, and which, due to a series of circumstances, makes him marry the one he does not love. For him, marriage takes on a whole new series of meanings. Although the marriage has been substantially happy, Zeno recognizes that the expected “inner renewal” is nothing but an illusion: the wife will certainly not change her husband.
Zeno’s Conscience – Chapter 4: The Wife and the Lover
After the first days of marriage, Zeno unexpectedly realizes that he loves Augusta, and considers her a bit like his protector; this pleasant situation lasts until Zeno sees an old college friend, Copler, who invites him to dedicate himself to charity with him, and more precisely to provide financial help to Carla, a very young singer.
When Copler invites Zeno to judge Carla’s singing, he begins to desire her, until Carla becomes his lover, encouraged by Zeno to improve her singing in his moments of despair. To improve her voice, he hires a singing teacher for her lover, with whom Carla falls in love, to the point of leaving Zeno, who falls into a deep desolation. In the story of his adventure, Zeno oscillates between the attitude of open confession and the search for any justification. While he confesses, he wants to appear to others and to himself (and succeeds) innocent and pure, words that constitute the entire soul of his love story. As for the justifications, instead, the one he most accredited was that he did not love Augusta, so why should he have felt remorse? Finally, he did not completely lack resistance to sin, since he did not reach Carla “in one rush, but in stages”.
Zeno also recalls that when he finds himself with, by pure chance, the treatise on singing to give to Carla, he is “forced” by his wife to bring it to her. In the meantime, he considers guilt as an advancement of the disease, while innocence appears to him as health.
Zeno’s Conscience – Chapter 5: Story of a Business Association
When Guido (who has become Ada’s husband) decides to go into business, opening a trading house, he involves Zeno, and hires a secretary, Carmen. Guido, on the advice of some English businessmen, buys some copper sulphate, then he would have resold it when the price went up, but instead of following the good advice he does his own thing and immediately sells the product, making a serious loss. In the meantime, a lack of care for the agency is evident on both sides, and these are the first steps towards ruin.
In the meantime, Ada gives birth to twins, and is struck by an illness that makes her progressively ugly, Guido becomes Carmen’s lover. So the “businessman” does not accept the advice to declare bankruptcy, with the consequence of the cancellation of the debts, and both Ada and Augusta are quite worried about the situation. The first for the economic one, the second also because Zeno had decided to make a substantial loan to Guido. Not knowing what to do, Guido implements a sneaky strategy that had previously brought him success: he ingests a powerful sleeping pill, Veronal, which, if taken in high doses, could cause significant damage to the body, and there was also the possibility of death.
An eventuality that occurs by chance, as Guido only wanted to pretend to be on the point of death, to gain affection. Zeno then begins to work for two, in Guido’s place, and for this very reason he completely forgets about the funeral of his colleague-friend, and for this reason Ada despises him, but she is seen by Zeno as ungrateful. However, he has no opportunity to make her understand, as Ada leaves for Argentina. Zeno, faced with the misfortune that happened to his friend, realizes the originality of life: until then he had considered the cliché that defines life as cruel and right, but now he reevaluates it and realizes that it is impossible to define what is good and what is bad: in fact, he remembers when, as a child, friends and relatives gave contrasting opinions about him, that he asked his mother: “but was I good or bad?” This same dilemma that tormented him as a child haunts him even now, thirty years later. So according to Zeno “life is neither bad nor good, but it is original!”.
Zeno is induced to this reflection by the situation he had to endure, which saw him in the opposite role to the one he had always supported, starting with his father and ending with Ada, who now defines him as “the best man in the family”.
Zeno’s Conscience – Chapter 6: Psychoanalysis
Zeno writes this last chapter of his memoirs in a different light than the one he saw in the others: he recognizes that Doctor S. had not cured him at all, and sends him this last part of his memories to make him understand what he thought of his treatment; and he is treated by “a real doctor, one of those who examine the body when it is ill”, who finds him in perfect health. In the meantime we have arrived in 1915, when Italy enters the First World War, and Zeno’s villa is located right on the border between Austria and Italy, so he is prevented from entering, and will be transferred with his family to Trieste, where he will see the effects of the war on himself: he considers himself lucky first of all because he has rid himself of his illness, and he looks at the world with different eyes, because he considers himself lucky in the midst of the ugliness of war.
The last chapter makes explicit Svevo’s pessimistic conception of life, previously veiled by self-irony about Zeno’s illness. That illness is therefore considered an inseparable attribute of life, which therefore becomes in turn an “illness”, always mortal. In a certain way this is not the case for Zeno, who draws his healing from war (which, as far as Zeno can tell, can be considered to a large extent belonging to “evil”). This cruel instrument of treatment once again underlines the author’s pessimism. In the last part of the book, Zeno also transfers his illness from his private life to the whole of society, especially that of his time, making it take on cosmic dimensions.
