Moravia confessed that when he wanted to deal with questions about reality in literature, he found that Joyce and Proust, two contemporaries, had written everything they could about reality. So he decided to take a different approach, incorporating tragic writing techniques into the novel, or using the form of tragedy to show the existence of modern people. Through the novel "The Indifferent Man", we find that he basically met this requirement. The novel focuses on the intricate relationship between five people, namely mother, daughter, son, mother's lover and mother's friend, and what happened to these five people in two days. The scenes of the play require brevity, and in The Cold Man, the main scenes of the story are the villa of the Aldengo family, the house of the mother's friend Lisa, the apartment of the mother's lover Leo, and the lobby where the dance party is held once or twice and the interior of the taxi. What happened to Aldengo's house mainly happened in the dining room and living room.
Among them, especially a few scenes or conversations where people eat in the restaurant, it is easy to impress the reader. At the dinner table, the daughter's premonition of boring and similar dialogues shows the mother's jealousy, jealousy, irritability, attachment to the lover and the resulting stupid behavior, the daughter's own empty head, the yearning for a new life, the disgust and indifference to the present, the cowardice, disguise, boredom and indifference of the younger brother Michelet, and the hypocrisy, cunning, and contrivance of the mother's lover. In these respects, Moravia is indeed writing the novel in a theatrical way. However, the more important story actually takes place not in these realistic scenes, but in the theater that uses reality as a material to build on the inner hearts of the characters. Whether it is the mother, daughter, son and lover, or Lisa, who breaks the closed relationship of four (which is controlled by the mother's lover Leo), they are controlled by their respective personalities and desires and desires, and often fall into deep fantasies.
Her mother often fantasized about Leo's warmth with her, probably because she had discovered her old age and decay. And sometimes, she fantasized that Leo had betrayed her. Later, she childishly fantasized that Leo, a good man, could worry about his children and arrange their fate. Her daughter, Carla, fantasizes about a whole new life, for which she must make sacrifices that are too late to recognize or, more accurately, unwilling to recognize this harsh reality. The fantasy of the lover Leo is more practical, and the fantasy of this veteran of the love field is often from experience and has a high degree of implementability. Lisa's fantasy is almost the same as her mother's fantasy, but the object is changed.
Perhaps the most impressive fantasy in the book is Michelet's fantasy, especially in the penultimate act when he embarks on his way to kill Leo. In this fantasy, he uttered the heart-warming maxim: "This is my real crime, I am committing the crime of indifference." Tragedy, then, is not only played out in the lives of these characters, but also in the hearts of these characters, in the gap between their hearts and their deeds. Such a psychological narrative shows the reader that the tragedy of this modernity is infiltrating people's lives inch by inch, while at the same time eating away at people's existence.
Mikale's indifference, Carla's indifference, is different from what we call indifference every day, different from the suppression of feelings of compassion and pity, but an attitude of boredom and tiredness of everything, a lifeless state that can do anything. This state is because they cannot be identified with existence, cannot feel the existence of this body, and cannot perceive existence. Therefore, life is like a stagnant water that has lost its source, and even though it flashes confusion and doubt in its mind, it is still unable to take a step forward.