"Come se fossi stato capace di ammazzarla": il racconto del personaggio "nervoso" in Mia madre di Tozzi

In Mia madre, a novella by Tozzi collected in Giovani, cruelty is the central element in the narrator's attitude, who recounts a traumatic episode that occurred when he attended the seminary. From his model for this novella, Maupassant's Le Papa de Simon, Tozzi takes up the idea of a protagonist stigmatised by the other children for reasons related to the figure of his father. In both texts, the victim unexpectedly displays sadistic traits. However, the narrator of Mia madre is marked, like the other young people in the novella collection of the same name, by psychic dissociation, which will be analysed in the light of the author's psychological references. Moreover, the narrative construction is innovated with respect to the hypotext. With an atypical handling of the homodiegesis, Tozzi pushes the reader to observe the facts through the filter of a character who judges events with superstitious thinking and establishes obscure links between things, for instance, between his behaviour and the death of his mother.