The Death Penalty and Narrative Strategies in Porte aperte by Leonardo Sciascia

Abstract

This paper analyzes narrative strategies used by Leonardo Sciascia in Porte aperte to create, among readers, sympathy for and identification with his (nameless) protagonist, a judge and an opponent of capital punishment. The judge has been called on to preside over a murder trial in 1937, a decade after Fascism had re-instated the death penalty, considered by the Regime a deterrent that would allow Italians to sleep with “open doors.” To that end, I consider the historical context in which the novel was written—given that Italian Constitution, in force since 1 January 1948, had abolished the death penalty—and the impact Sciascia sought to have on his readers. That is, Sciascia’s long-time opposition to the death penalty is to some extent pretext for ‘re-litigating’ in 1987, a decade after the fact, two polemics of the late 1970s. The first public controversy had been sparked by his declaration (issued during the trial of colonna torinese of the Red Brigades) of personal neutrality in the struggle of the Italian State to suppress terrorist subversion, the other by Sciascia’s contention that the political parties who refused to negotiate with the terrorists for the release of Aldo Moro had indirectly re-introduced the death penalty in Italy.