Abstract
Building on Bakhtin's “plurality of voices” and on an anti-Hegelian exclusion of the subject from historical process, the essay explores how the unconventional plot of the novel symbolically resists and parodies the capitalist principles of contemporary 1960's Italian consumer society. The novel achieves this resistance by a calculated embedding of narrative spaces of transgression and rule-breaking actions within the main frame narrative, thereby positing an unproductive and non-conformist clash between the narrator-protagonist's hallucinatory and doxastic worlds (embedded texts) and the objective world of consumer society – represented by the frame narrative.
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