Johnny Michele Amitrano

643 Words2 Pages

Michele Amitrano is a young, innocent boy who discovers the heinous crimes of his father and his friends. The brutal, torturous treatment of the boy, Filippo Carducci, is one aspect of this novel that makes it so horribly compelling and tragic. As evident by the title, fear plays a large part in the story; it manipulates the characters and helps to move the plot in ways that are unpredictable. It is a combination of the previous two topics that begin to change Michele’s character throughout the novel. Michele’s childhood innocence begins to dissolve as he discovers that it is not the monsters he dreams of that he should fear, but it is man himself who he should really be afraid of. Michele, early on in the novel, shows that he believes in the supernatural, “Maybe the witches were there, naked and old, standing round the hole laughing …show more content…

Sergio is one of Pino’s friends who comes to stay in Michele’s house. Michele knows that Filippo was kidnapped by Sergio so he refused to sleep in the same room with him, even before meeting him. One day, after Sergio had woken up and left the room, Michele decided to go through his suitcase and found a pistol. Michele’s innocence was gone after seeing the gun and he held it. Michele did not know what he was planning to do with that gun or why he had it, but, luckily, he put it back in the suitcase. “I opened it and inside there was a pistol. I stared at it. It was big, it had a wooden butt and it was black. I lifted it. It was very heavy. Maybe it was loaded. I put it back.” (113) Judging by the way Ammaniti wrote that paragraph, in spurts of short sentences, it seems as though he was making Michele seem childlike and naive and possibly even frightened. It is around this point in the novel that Michele does realize that it really is not monster he should be afraid of, they can be controlled by his imagination, but it is men whom he should

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