SOURCE: "Zeno's Ontological Confessions," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 18, No. 1, January, 1972, pp. 45-56.

In the following essay, Davis examines Zeno Cosini's struggle to comprehend the meaning of his existence in Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno as a process that can only be understood in relation to his own death.

Zeno Cosini, the fictional (and somewhat autobiographical) author of Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, writes the following fable:

THE CRAB (impaled on a hook, reflectively):
 Life is
 sweet, but one must watch where one sits down.
 
 THE JOHN DORY (just off to the dentist): Life is
 sweet,
 but one must rid it of those treacherous monsters
 who
 hide steel fangs in tasty flesh.1

Both the crab and the John Dory fish of the fable are able to accept life in a way that Zeno himself is unable to do despite his efforts throughout most of the writing of his...