Avoiding the studied poetic imagery of [La Strada], Vitelloni is at once a subtler and a more perceptive work. The protagonists, no longer alienated from the conventions of civilization, are now isolated within the social organism. Existing under the watchful observation of family and friends, these vitelloni, too young to have fought in the war but old enough to have suffered its consequences, are trapped in a wasteland of their own devising.

The young wastrels chosen to represent the modern generation in Vitelloni are carefully differentiated as illustrations of Fellini's ambitious theme…. These young men, their thinking molded erratically by Hemingway, Nietzsche, and the Hollywood Myth, dream of big-game hunting in Africa with Esther Williams, but settle for a drunken evening at the local pool hall. (pp. 24-5)

Fellini is incisive in mocking the empty pretensions of these youths, and employs a series of trenchant symbolic images to...