The novel Il compagno finds justification in that historical-political occasion, more than in the internal development of Pavese’s work. In the author’s intentions the novel had to be the exaltation of the proletarian world, but just for its innate incapability to adapt to some external schemes, really it represents" the point of rift between the reason of the Resistance and its intellectual idealization ". Undoubtedly the reassertion of his theory of the myth and the human destiny, that was the central spring of Dialoghi con Leucò, has contributed to reduce its political engagement. Technically and stylistically Pavese succeeded in bringing that ability of dalogue to a conclusion, that structures the same narrative line of the novel.
The protagonist is a certain Pablo, a young idler that lives in Turin, playing the guitar in gangs on the hills and in the inns. In an place of outskirts between singers of variety and an environment of crepuscular manner, the love is developed between him and a tailor, a certain Linda, vivacious, cheerful, but very inconstant woman. She had been Amelio’s lover, friend of Pablo, but now this is immobilized in bed because of a motorcycle accident.
Linda works in an atelier and from this environment she has drawn her innate flirtation. But there is in her, really, a moral void that prevents her from being faithful to Amelio as now to Pablo, which at a certain point ends with enjoying to have been humiliated by the inconstancy of Linda, that betrays him with the manager Lubrani. But Pablo feels the void and the uneasiness of his life in Turin, he realizes that the guitar can be a relaxation, but it cannot replace the work. Pushed by this internal crisis, that wakes up again in him the worker conscience, Pablo decides to leave Turin and to move to Rome, where the contact and the friendship with men of the Resistance, from the Maggiore tied up to the middle class opposition, to the poor Scarpa, hero of the war of Spain, succeed in inserting him in a job and he finds the ransom of his useless and mean life in Turin. Then he is imprisoned, but either the jail and his new love for China, and the definitive detaching from Linda, represent the varied stops of his internal maturing of active and hard-working man