Il fantastico ambiguo in quattro racconti di Dino Buzzati

Författare

Johan Gansmark

Summary, in English

This bachelor's thesis examines the ambiguous fantastic in four short stories by Dino Buzzati: “Sette piani” (1937), “Il colombre” (1961), “Suicidio al parco” (1966), and “Il cane che ha visto Dio” (1958), drawn from the collections Sessanta racconti and Il colombre e altri cinquanta racconti. Drawing primarily on Tzvetan Todorov's seminal definition of the fantastic — characterised by the reader's and characters' unresolved hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations — the study investigates how Buzzati employs the fantastic mode to explore existential themes such as desire, obsession, the passage of time, and death.The analysis integrates Todorov's three conditions for the fantastic with Remo Ceserani's more flexible, narratological perspective, which emphasises rhetorical and narrative strategies rather than rigid genre boundaries. Particular attention is paid to techniques that generate ambiguity and reader involvement: thresholds and border crossings (both spatial/mental and ontological), mediating objects, temporal ellipses, and the strategic engagement of the implied reader. Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between arbitrary linguistic signs and motivated symbols is briefly applied to interrogate the tension between literal reading (necessary for sustaining Todorovian hesitation) and allegorical/symbolic interpretation (which tends to resolve it).The findings demonstrate that Buzzati's fantastic emerges from the juxtaposition of an ordinary, chronicle-like reality with inexplicable or obsessive disruptions, producing an enduring perceptual ambiguity. Rather than strictly adhering to Todorov's pure fantastic, Buzzati's narratives often oscillate between the uncanny, the marvellous, and the allegorical, using these oscillations to reflect on human limits, self-deception, and the elusive boundary between reality and illusion. The thesis argues that this sustained ambiguity — rather than definitive resolution — constitutes the distinctive power of Buzzati's short fiction.

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