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Morality in the Child and Adult World
An excellent essay on the novel I'm not Scared by Niccolò Ammaniti by Kathleen Grohman, student at Gonzaga in Florence, for the course Studies in Fiction, professor Gabriela Dragnea Horvath.
The juxtaposition of the child’s world and the adult world in I’m Not Scared points out a major flaw in the adult world: the jaded sense of morality. This is revealed through the child protagonist’s initiation into the adult world.Niccolo Ammaniti’s choice to write from a child’s perspective gives the reader the opportunity to look at a mature situation through a child’s eyes, so the complexity of the situation is somehow made simpler. Michele’s sense of morality is still pure and clear and has not yet been tainted by the adult world the way that Michele’s father’s morality has been. Michele instinctively knows that keeping a boy in a hole is wrong, regardless of the circumstances that led to that situation. Meanwhile, Michele’s father has let the other considerations and responsibilities in his life cloud his judgment about kidnapping. From the very beginning of the novel, Michele has had a well defined conscience, which is exhibited in his actions. As the story progresses and the adult world thrusts a complicated moral conflict upon Michele, he must choose whether to follow his basic ideas of right and wrong or whether to follow his father’s new set of morals.
One of the first examples of Michele’s inherent morality comes at the beginning of the novel when he volunteers to take the forfeit for Barbara. “The forfeit was too harsh. None of us wanted to see Barbara’s slit. It was punishment for us as well. My stomach tightened. I wished I was far away. There was something dirty, something…I don’t know. Something nasty, that’s all. And I didn’t like my sister being there” (p. 20). Skull, who had proposed the forfeit, is the oldest in the group and a bully so the other kids’ fear of him allowed him to emerge as the leader. Michele describes Skull as having a “sadistic mind” (p. 19) and does not like that Skull made Barbara show her breasts in the previous forfeit. Through his dominance, Skull is imposing cruelty and lecherousness from the adult world on the rest of the group. Skull has already learned one way that social hierarchy is made in the adult world: a hierarchy based on power and fear.
Michele does not say exactly what it is that makes him feel so uncomfortable. He calls it “dirty,” “nasty,” and “too harsh,” but what he is actually feeling is denoted by the ellipses, which could be filled in as “morally wrong.” The ellipses in that quotation are a stylistic choice that Ammaniti has made to show that Michele knows he feels bad but cannot quite express why he feels that way because he does not have the words, life experience or maturity to describe it fully. What he can describe is his gut reaction when he hears the forfeit, which is his intuitive sense of morality. Also, Michele says that one of the reasons he is uncomfortable is because his sister is present during this exchange. His sense of responsibility to her and the role that his mother has encouraged him to fill as Maria’s protector also illustrates Michele’s morality and may even prepare him for the role of helping and caring for the boy in the hole.
When Michele first finds Filippo in the hole, he is too young to comprehend what he has discovered and uses examples from his life, things he has been taught or told and his imagination to explain what he has found. Most of Michele’s explanations involve monsters, which are a running theme throughout the book. “He was alive. He had pretended to be dead. Why? Maybe he was ill. Maybe he was a monster. A werewolf…But werewolves didn’t exist. ‘Stop all this talk about monsters, Michele. Monsters don’t exist. Ghosts, werewolves and witches are just nonsense invented to frighten mugs like you. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters,’ papa had said to me…But if they had hidden him there, there must be a reason. Papa would explain it all to me” (p.49-50). Monsters are a metaphor for Michele’s transformation over the course of the novel. At the beginning, Michele is afraid of imaginary monsters, but by the end, as per papa’s advice, Michele encounters real monsters, which turn out to be people he is very close to. Michele learns that what he ought to be afraid of is the evil side of human nature, not some imaginary creature. At the very end, Michele conquers the fear of both imaginary monsters and the evil that people do to each other by choosing the pure morality that he knows at the beginning of the book over the new morality that his father proposes, this could be one explanation of the title of the novel. Monsters also serve a stylistic function in the book because they make the child’s perspective seem more real and believable. The reader knows that the imaginary monsters Michele is afraid of are not real, but that the fear Michele experiences is real. Also, Ammanitit writes in short staccato sentences to give the reader a sense of a child’s simplistic thought process. At this point, Michele has not found out that his father is actually involved in the kidnapping and hopes that his father will explain everything to him.
Like most little boys, Michele idolizes his father and one of the most dramatic steps of growing up is finding out that one’s parents are not perfect, that they do not know all the answers, that they tell lies and that they can sometimes do bad things. At the beginning of the novel, Michele rides his father’s old bike, and even though it is not as nice as the other kids’ bikes, Michele loves it. “My bike was an old boneshaker, with a patched up saddle, and so high I had to lean right over to touch the ground. Everyone called it ‘the Crock’…But I liked it, it was my father’s” (p.6). When Michele finds the sauce pan and recognizes that his father is involved with the Filippo, he assumes that his father’s involvement is justified by some morally acceptable reason. With this new information, Michele proposes a new explanation for Filippo. “Maybe the boy in the hole was my brother, and he had been born mad like Nunzio and papa had hidden him there, so as not to frighten my sister and me…Maybe he and I were twins…Papa had put him in a sack and taken him onto the hill to kill him, he had put him on the ground, in the wheat, and he should have stabbed him but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, he was his son after all, so he had dug a hole, chained him inside and brought him up there” (p. 69). In this explanation, Michele is still grasping for ways to make his father morally justified in the situation. Regardless of the morality of actually killing or hiding a child in a hole because he or she was mentally ill, in Michele’s mind, this would be an acceptable reason for the boy to be in the hole and his father to be involved, especially because his father had decided not to kill the child. In formulating this explanation, Michele was drawing upon the experience of one of his neighbors, which shows that Michele is using all techniques he is able to try to make sense of this terrifying situation he has encountered. It is also important to note the connection that Michele feels towards Filippo even though he doesn’t yet know anything about him. It is easy for Michele to relate to Filippo because he is a boy his same age, but the reader hopes that Michele would be able to connect with any person that he stumbled upon in that situation and that Michele’s desire to help comes from a shared humanity.
Only when Michele sees Felice’s car and realizes that Felice is involved does he try to deny that his father has anything to do with it. Michele understands Felice as a bad person in the same way that he understands Skull’s forfeits to be morally wrong. “He wasn’t my twin and he wasn’t even my brother. And papa had nothing to do with him” (p. 79). Michele’s father really falls off his pedestal in his son’s eyes the night that he overhears Sergio and the others talking about the kidnapping. “Papa tried to answer, then he swallowed and lowered his gaze. He had called him an imbecile. I felt as if I had been stabbed in the side. Nobody had ever talked to papa like that. Papa was the boss of Acqua Traverse…The old man was like the emperor. When the emperor’s in a black mood everyone has to keep quiet. Including papa” (p. 87). Michele has recognized the same social hierarchy in this adult society as he understands in his own group of friends. Sergio holds that power and can bully the others without them questioning his judgment. Michele is so shocked that he almost feels physical pain and later he even calls his father “the bogeyman” (p. 90). After this night, there is a huge shift in the way Michele views his father and this is a big step in Michele’s initiation into adulthood.
When Michele finally confronts his father and asks him why he has kidnapped Filippo, his father reveals some of his actual justification. “’There are things that seem wrong when you…’ His voice was broken and he couldn’t find the words. ‘The world’s wrong, Michele’” (p. 162). Michele’s father cannot find the words because the words do not actually exist. Kidnapping Filippo seems wrong because it is wrong and that is what Michele decides in the end when he chooses to help Filippo over the promise he makes to his father. Michele’s father thinks that the world is wrong because of the social stratification that has kept their family poor, and he thinks these circumstances give him the moral justification to kidnap Filippo. It is also possible, though less explicated in the novel, that Michele’s father is referring to his involvement in the Mafia as the wrong world. Acqua Traverse is a poor, southern town and Michele knows that the North is wealthy. “I knew the North was rich and the South was poor. And we were poor. Mama said that if papa kept working so hard, soon we wouldn’t be poor any longer, we would be well off. So we mustn’t complain if papa wasn’t there. He was doing it for us” (p. 33). This describes very well the reasoning behind the kidnapping and how Michele and Maria are supposed to respond to it based on their parents’ morality. These sentences could easily say, if papa has to kidnap a child, then we mustn’t complain because he was doing it for us. Or, if papa must kill that child, then we mustn’t complain because he was doing it for us.
Michele’s father even goes so far as to buy Michele a new bike in order to sway him to accept this new moral structure. But Michele sees right through it and wishes that the surprise had been Filippo’s freedom. “I had trouble keeping up with the others. Red Dragon was a rip-off. I didn’t want to admit it, but it was” (p.186). The fact that this bike is fake could be symbolic of the fact that the morality his father is trying to sell him is also fake or hollow. But the morality that his father has presented him with is very tempting. Michele mentions several times that he wants to leave Acqua Traverse and calls Acqua Traverse a “place forgotten by God” (p. 32). After the most traumatic day of his young life, when he is beaten by Felice and then witnesses Felice trying to rape his mother, his mother whispers, “when you grow up you must go away from here and never come back” (p. 158). It is at this point in the story that Michele must make a choice between his natural, pure morality as he understood it at the beginning of the novel and this tainted adult version of morality that is muddled enough to morally justify the kidnapping of a boy. For a while, Michele is very conflicted. “I was thinking of Filippo. What was I going to do now? I had promised him I would go and see him again, but I couldn’t, I had sworn to papa that I wouldn’t go” (p. 167). In the end Michele chooses to help Filippo and on his way there he chooses to take the old Crock instead of the Red Dragon which could be the physical manifestation of his moral choice.
Meanwhile, Ammaniti has used the scorching heat in Acqua Traverse as a method of foreshadowing and tension building. The weather finally breaks into a dramatic thunderstorm during the climax of the novel, when Michele makes his heroic choice to save Filippo. In the end, Michele’s father does show signs of rejecting the set of morals that he has adopted. He does not want to kill the boy and when it comes down to it, none of the other kidnapper want to either. The men say that they do not want to kill the boy because they do not want to be the one that goes to prison for it, but hopefully it is also because they know that murder is wrong. They decide to draw straws in the end as a way of releasing themselves from responsibility, but even so, Michele’s father does not aim to kill when he finally does shoot who he thinks is Filippo. When Michele’s father realizes that he has actually shot his own son, it is basically the equivalent of his tainted moral structure being backfiring on him. It forces the universality of human experience that Michele instinctively feels for Filippo back on his father who is now forced to feel the pain he has inflicted on Filippo’s parents.
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