SOURCE: "Moravia's Proletarian Roman Intellectuals," in The Modern Language Journal, Vol. XLIV, No. 7, November, 1960, pp. 303-6.

In the following excerpt, Mitchell praises Moravia's use of uneducated, middle-class narrators as a new mode of expression.

While Alberto Moravia's post-war preference for proleterian Roman settings and characters is well known, it does not seem to have been recognized that La Romana and the two volumes of Racconti romani represent not just a new predilection in subject matter but also a rather daring narrative experiment. This experiment lies in the creation of a novel sort of fictitious narrator. The literary practice of abandoning more or less remote anonymity for the nearer vantage point of a personage in the story is not, of course, new, though narrators' connections with the events which they have to relate have often been, as in Madame Bovary, so slight as to make the whole device rather...