One, None and a Hundred Thousand

In an autobiographical letter, the author refers to this work as the “…bitterest of all, profoundly humoristic, about the decomposition of life….” Vitangelo, the protagonist, discovers by way of a completely irrelevant question that his wife poses to him that everyone he knows, and everyone he has ever met, has constructed a Vitangelo persona in their own imagination and that none of these personas corresponds to the image of Vitangelo that he himself has constructed and believes himself to b…