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Fragmented Selves: A Comparative
Study of Fernando Pessoa and Italo
Svevo
Table of Contents
- The Early 20th-Century Crisis of Identity and Literary Modernism
- Fernando Pessoa: the Multiplicity of the Self
- Italo Svevo: Life, Thought and La coscienza di Zeno
- Comparative Analysis of Fernando Pessoa and Italo Svevo
- Narrative Technique and Cultural Context
- Conclusion: Two Poles of a Modernist Vision
The aim of this essay is to compare Fernando Pessoa and Italo Svevo by highlighting the representation of the self-identity crisis, the relationship between introspection and “inettitudine”, the influence of the cultural environments in which the two authors developed their works, and the modernist strategies employed to depict psychological fragmentation. The main sources employed in the analysis are La coscienza di Zeno by Svevo and Pessoa's works: Livro do Desassossego (Bernardo Soares) and Tabacaria (Álvaro de Campos).
1. The Early 20th-Century Crisis of Identity and Literary
Modernism
The beginning of the 20th century brought many profound social, cultural, and intellectual changes that reshaped the idea of the self and identity. Industrialization, urbanization, and the strong impact of World War I resulted in a sense of uncertainty that was reflected in literature as well. Writers began to explore themes such as alienation, fragmentation, and the instability of the human mind, giving birth to the literary movement of modernism.
Modernism represented a clear break from the literary conventions of the 19th century. Authors rejected traditional narrative forms, such as realism and coherent story structures, and instead preferred experimenting with new techniques: fragmented narration, complex symbolism, and artistic innovations. The aim of this type of literature was to reflect the disorienting experiences of modern life and to invite the reader to actively engage with the text, interpreting its numerous layers of meaning. Influenced by progress in psychology, particularly Freud’s theories, modernists focused on consciousness and subjectivity, using techniques like stream-of-consciousness to depict characters’ thoughts and perceptions, often in a non-linear way, in order to capture the complexity of the human mind.
Language and form became central to modernist experimentation; writers played with syntax, narrative structure, and point of view, often using unreliable narrators and non-linear timelines. Instead of following universal truths or moral lessons, modernist literature focused on individual experience, highlighting the subjective nature of reality. This literary production also reflected the alienation and disillusion created by World War I, portraying characters with fragmented identities and a loss of faith in traditional values and institutions.
Fernando Pessoa and Italo Svevo perfectly embody the modernist concerns. Pessoa explored the multiplicity of the self through his heteronyms, creating a poetic universe in which identity is fluid and fragmented, reflecting existential and national concerns. Svevo, on the other hand, focused on the psychological realism of his characters, particularly Zeno, whose self-perception is marked by uncertainty, hesitation, and ironic self-awareness. Both authors deal with fragmented subjectivity, but from different perspectives: Svevo through introspective and ironic narratives of the “sick” modern man, Pessoa through the plurality of poetic identities.
The historical and cultural contexts of Trieste and Lisbon profoundly influenced their works. Trieste, Svevo’s hometown, was a multilingual and cosmopolitan port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, exposed to Italian, German, and Slavic cultures as well as to the ideas of Freud, Darwin, and German philosophy. Svevo’s works reflect this in-between condition, showing the psychological complexity and ironic detachment of a man navigating multiple cultural identities. Lisbon, Pessoa’s city, was at the periphery of Europe, experiencing both a process of modernization and the shadow of Portugal’s declining past. This tension between tradition and innovation, between national identity and cosmopolitanism, is central to Pessoa’s works.
2. Fernando Pessoa: the Multiplicity of the Self and Livro do
Desassossego
Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. He grew up between Portugal and South Africa, moving among different cultures that profoundly shaped his education. After returning to Lisbon in 1905, he became a pivotal figure in the city’s lively modernist scene, which eventually led to the creation of the avant-garde magazine Orpheu. From early childhood, starting with the imaginary figure Chevalier de Pas, through whom he wrote letters to himself, as he mentioned in a letter to Casais Monteiro, Pessoa began to express parts of his inner life through imaginary characters. This practice later developed into what he called heteronymy. These figures were not simple pseudonyms: he created fully developed poetic identities, each with its own biography, personality, and writing style.
In 1914, Alberto Caeiro made his appearance, followed by Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. These heteronyms reflect different aspects of Pessoa’s fragmented personality. Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer trained in Glasgow, is the modernist, restless, and neurotic voice, expressing Pessoa’s dynamic and troubled side. Alberto Caeiro, a frail and solitary countryman, is intentionally anti-intellectual and deeply connected to nature, representing the poet’s natural, calm, and anti-metaphysical instinct. Ricardo Reis, a doctor
revenge. The story is told in the first person, is not in chronological order, and focuses on key moments of Zeno’s life: his childhood and his conflict with his father, his smoking habit, his marriage and affair, and his involvement in business and social life. Zeno grows up in a wealthy family, but his difficult relationship with his father creates insecurity. His addiction to cigarettes symbolizes his inability to take action; he constantly tries to quit, yet every “last cigarette” shows a mix of will and self-deception. In love, he first wants to marry Ada Malfenti but is rejected. He ends up marrying Augusta, whom he later learns to love, and he has an affair with Carla, which eventually ends. All these experiences show his constant struggle between desire, responsibility and self-doubt. The novel explores Zeno’s psychology, his feelings of illness and inadequacy, and his attempt to understand himself. Zeno eventually realizes that his problems are not only personal but also connected to the society around him; this awareness makes him more open to change than the “normal” people, who remain trapped in routine and conformity. Svevo uses self-analysis as a narrative method and a non-linear structure and the ironic tone that reflects the way memory and the unconscious work. Irony protects Zeno from the absurdity of life but also reveals his contradictions. La coscienza di Zeno is a major modernist novel and anticipates themes later developed in existentialist and psychoanalytic literature.
Svevo’s thinking is influenced by many sources: positivism, Darwin, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud. He does not follow one philosophy strictly; instead, he uses ideas from each thinker to understand human behavior. From Darwin and positivism he takes a scientific view of life. From Marx he takes a critical view of society. From Schopenhauer and Nietzsche he learns methods of introspection and the idea that the self is complicated and divided. Freud is especially important: Svevo is interested in psychoanalysis as a way to understand the mind, even if he does not believe in it as a medical cure.
In addition, in his view, people who feel “sick,” insecure or out of place are often more aware and open to change than those who seem “healthy” and perfectly adapted to society. This idea is central in La coscienza di Zeno , where Zeno’s weakness becomes a strange form of strength.
For Svevo, literature is a way to save life from being forgotten: by writing and narrating, a person can recover memories, desires and emotions that everyday life usually hides or suppresses. His style is simple, ironic, and focused on inner life, moreover, he combines psychological analysis with humor, and he modernizes the novel without using extreme experimental techniques. Through his interest in the unconscious, irony, and self-analysis, Svevo created one of the most original voices of European modernism.
4. Comparative Analysis of Fernando Pessoa and Italo
Svevo
4.1 The Crisis of the Modern Self: Fragmentation and Ineptitude
One of the main concerns of European modernism is the idea of the collapse of a stable and unified self: writers began to question long-standing statements about identity and consciousness. In this cultural context, Fernando Pessoa and Italo Svevo emerged as two of the main observers of this crisis, even if they gave two different answers to the fragmentation of modern identity: Pessoa multiplies the self into many different and distinct authorial voices, while Svevo shows the contradictions and weaknesses that live inside a single person. Pessoa’s answer to the impossibility of a single self is radical: he created the heteronyms that, as mentioned before, are fully developed fictional authors. Heteronyms were not just simple literary experiments, but a way to show that identity isn’t fixed, but made of many shifting parts. On the other hand, Svevo depicts the fragmentation inside a single consciousness; instead of multiplying the self, he breaks down the unity of the self from within. His well-known character Zeno Cosini, protagonist of La coscienza di Zeno , isn’t capable of providing a coherent and sincere account of his own life. This instability perfectly reflects Svevo’s multicultural background: he grew up in Trieste, a city influenced by Italian, German, and local traditions in the final years of the Habsburg Empire. Even Zeno’s name, which comes from the Greek xenos, meaning “stranger,” recalls a man alienated from others and from himself.
Moreover, another consequence of this fractured self is a condition that Svevo often depicts: “inettitudine” (ineptitude), the inability to act decisively and take control of one’s life. For example, characters such as Alfonso Nitti and Emilio Brentani^1 are paralyzed by excessive doubt and overthinking. Zeno Cosini, however, transforms this paralysis into a subject of reflection; although he lets life carry him along, he observes his failures with irony, his passivity becoming a form of consciousness. This kind of behaviour resembles the poetic voice of Álvaro de Campos, one of Pessoa’s heteronyms, particularly in a passage of Tabacaria , where he expresses a sense of helplessness: he is aware of the absolute void and does not even hope that it can be filled; there is no will to want to be anything; yet his inner self is not empty but full of dreams — even if he cannot live, he can still dream:
“Não sou nada. Nunca serei nada. Não posso querer ser nada. À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.”
Like Zeno, Campos observes reality from a distance, caught between the richness of his inner life and his inability to act in the external world. The symbol of the window recurs in Pessoa’s works: in Tabacaria , Álvaro’s mind is imprisoned in a room that looks out onto the real world through a window, which allows contact with reality but not true participation, creating a sense of paralysis. Bernardo Soares is similarly described, by Antonio Tabucchi^2 , as a man standing at a window, silently watching life pass by him. The window places him in a position of permanent observation, separating him from action and reinforcing his role as a spectator rather than a participant. From behind the glass, the external world appears close and visible, yet remains unreachable, producing a sense of distance and immobility. For Soares, the window opens
(^2) Author of Un baule pieno di gente: Scritti su Fernando Pessoa , Feltrinelli, 1990
(^1) Respectively protagonists of Una vita and Senilità
Their social positions reinforce these similarities. Both are modest clerks whose intellectual lives unfold in ordinary workplaces. These offices become symbols of modern alienation: neutral, anonymous spaces in which introspection replaces action. Their cities reflect their internal states: Pessoa’s Lisbon is quiet, contemplative, and dreamlike, while Svevo’s Trieste is a busy port full of cultural tension, echoing Zeno’s ambivalence. Soares’s “insomnia” and Zeno’s “illness” become metaphors for a modern consciousness that is always aware of itself, always uneasy. This leads directly to two key psychological features of modernity: boredom and the unconscious. The analogy between Pessoa and Svevo, however, goes beyond psychology and reaches the level of form and structure. Both La coscienza di Zeno and Livro do Desassossego are anti-novels: fragmented, non-linear texts composed of notes, reflections and discontinuous memories rather than narrative progression. In each work, the protagonist’s voice oscillates between sincerity and irony, confession and parody, making it impossible to distinguish truth from self-deception. The fragment becomes a mirror of the fragmented self, and the lack of closure reflects the impossibility of achieving true self-knowledge. As Tabucchi observes, Pessoa’s work is a “book-project,” eternally unfinished, just as Zeno’s writing, originally intended as a cure, turns into an endless process of reinterpretation.
4.3 The Inner Landscape of Modernity: Boredom and the Unconscious
Both Svevo and Pessoa explore the psychological core of modern life through boredom and the unconscious. However, they do so in two different ways, even though they both ultimately reach similar conclusions about the emptiness and complexity of modern existence. In Pessoa's Livro do Desassossego, boredom (tédio) is a deep, metaphysical condition, it is not simply sadness; it reveals the soul's void, a state in which the individual experiences thinking without thinking and feeling without feeling, as Bernardo Soares writes: “pensar sem que se pense… sentir sem que se sinta” (Fragment 263, Livro do Desassossego). Pessoa himself admits the struggle to define this condition: “Tão dado como sou ao tédio… nunca me lembrou de meditar em que consiste.” (Fragment 263, Livro do Desassossego). This boredom is not linked to any external cause; it arises suddenly and without origin. Ultimately, Pessoa describes it as “a vacuidade da própria alma que sente o vácuo, que se sente vácuo” (Fragment 381, Livro do Desassossego), the emptiness of the soul that feels its own emptiness. Moreover, he describes it as a “cela infinita”: a prison from which one cannot escape. For Pessoa, boredom is the paralysis of being trapped in total but meaningless freedom. On the other hand, for Svevo, boredom is more practical and psychological. Zeno's boredom manifests as a lack of will, a life stuck in repetition. His obsession with the "last cigarette" captures this endless cycle of self-deception and procrastination.
“L’ultima sigaretta! Quante ultime sigarette ho fumato nella mia vita!” (“The last cigarette! How many last cigarettes have I smoked in my life!”)
Even his marriage, chosen more for convenience and comfort than for love, reflects Zeno’s emotional fatigue. He enters into the marriage not out of passion but because it is socially appropriate and less demanding, showing how his indecision and avoidance of meaningful
choices shape his life. This emotional inertia, his inability to act decisively or passionately, turns everyday responsibilities, like marriage, into a source of quiet exhaustion. For Zeno, boredom is the chronic illness of modern life, not a metaphysical abyss, but a behavioral inertia that drains his energy and affects everything he does.
Their different relationships with the unconscious also reveal their different approaches. Svevo places Freud’s ideas at the center of his novel; La coscienza di Zeno is structured around psychoanalysis, even while making fun and questioning Freud’s theories. Zeno’s story is shaped by the psychoanalytic setting, since the text is presented as the result of his self-analysis. Pessoa, on the other hand, was not directly influenced by Freud, yet his writings often revolve around inner fragmentation, dreams, and states bordering on the unconscious. His heteronyms function like autonomous psychic forces, anticipating modern theories of subjectivity. Through poetic intuition rather than psychoanalytic theory, Pessoa reaches similar questions about the multiplicity of the self and the opacity of inner life. These psychological insights become especially clear when looking at a shared symbol: the cigarette.
4.4 A Thread of Smoke: The Cigarette
A thin thread of smoke crosses twentieth-century European literature and symbolically connects two distant cities, Trieste and Lisbon, through two writers: Italo Svevo and Fernando Pessoa. The element that unites them is the cigarette. Although focusing on smoking in literary analysis may seem trivial, the cigarette plays a central role in the works of both authors and becomes a powerful symbol of inner conflict, desire, and escape.
In Italo Svevo’s work, smoking is inseparable from the character of Zeno Cosini. Zeno’s life is marked by the constant intention to smoke “the last cigarette,” a promise that is endlessly repeated and never fulfilled. Smoking becomes a compulsive habit, but also a ritual. Through the cigarette, Zeno tries to control his anxiety, his indecision, and his unresolved relationship with his father. Critics influenced by Freud have interpreted Zeno’s smoking as a fixation on the oral stage of childhood, a regression to an infantile condition that provides temporary comfort and reassurance. The cigarette allows Zeno to postpone decisions and to remain suspended in uncertainty, protected from the responsibilities of adult life.
A similar function can be found in the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, especially in the works of his heteronym Álvaro de Campos. Campos is one of the few Pessoa heteronyms who smokes, and the cigarette plays a significant role in his most famous poem, Tabacaria. Unlike Zeno, Campos does not live inside a novel but within a poetic and philosophical dimension marked by extreme self-awareness and metaphysical anxiety. Campos is obsessed with the act of thinking. His suffering comes from an excessive consciousness of reality and from an endless questioning of existence. In Tabacaria , this anguish reaches its peak when the poet reflects on the meaninglessness of both life and poetry. Reality appears absurd, repetitive, and empty. However, a sudden change occurs when Campos lights a cigarette. At that moment, thought stops. The cigarette brings him back to pure sensation: taste, smell, sight. He experiences a brief liberation from metaphysical speculation and reaches a state he defines as “sensory and competent.”
Fernando Pessoa and Italo Svevo approach the modern crisis of identity from opposite yet deeply complementary directions. Pessoa disassembles the self by multiplying it: through his heteronyms, he transforms identity into a constellation of possible existences, each complete in its own style, philosophy, and emotional texture. Svevo, instead, shows the contradictions within a single consciousness, revealing how the modern individual is fragmented not because he possesses multiple selves, but because he cannot fully understand even one.
In Pessoa, fragmentation becomes a creative force: identity is fluid, performative, and inherently plural. His modernism opens a space in which consciousness can experiment with different versions of itself, embracing uncertainty as an artistic condition. Svevo, by contrast, shows fragmentation as an existential impasse. Zeno’s introspections, filled with irony and self-deception, expose the impossibility of achieving self-coherence through reason alone. Despite these differences, both authors reach a similar conclusion: the unified, stable self of the 19th is no longer tenable. Whether multiplied into heteronyms or dissolved through irony, the self becomes a shifting, elusive entity shaped by memory, desire, and the unconscious. In this sense, Pessoa and Svevo illuminate two poles of the same modernist vision: one that seeks truth in plurality, and one that uncovers truth in contradiction.
Bibliography
- Antonio Tabucchi, Un baule pieno di gente, 1990
- Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno, 1923
- Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego, 1982
- Pessoa Fernando, Tabacaria in Álvaro de Campos, 1933, Presença
