Chapters 1 - 3 Summary and Analysis

Chapter 1

The book opens with the line, "Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History." The phrase "what men call History" brings out the central theme of the book. Levi takes the reader to Gagliano, the town in another world "hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death" (1). The citizens of Gagliano refer to themselves as "Christians" but this means merely being human. For they have a saying, "Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli" to communicate their being cut off from Christianity and everything else that is tied to Western civilization. "No message, human or divine, has reached...