Marcello Clerici , enamored of the weapons since he was a boy integrated in the general vitality of the nature, one day discovers to be different from his friends, abnormal for cruelty and vigor, to which an excitement and a physical disturbance are united too.
Marcello at home and at school, experiments his abnormality of an almost obsessive morbidity, until he arrives to the conclusion to think himself really different from the others, distressing himself for his future, that he foresees it is marked by a tragedian destiny.
As sean of this apprehension, there is an upsetting fact that confirms it in this discovery:at the exit from the school, in a solitary avenue, Marcello is approached by a homosexual driver, called Lino, who invites him to climb on his car and, promising him a gun as present, he brought him in a desert house: he exitated and upset, reveals to the boy his ignoble desires: Marcello ties to free himself, to run away, but he discovers that the doors is closed with the key. He shoot and kills the man with the gun that has hardly received as present. Then he escapes.
This dramatic event is the starting point for Marcello where he can built his future life, stamped on a clearly conventionality. After seventeen years he has becomes a mature man perfectly sure of himself , calm, of severe tastes, orderly, checked, cold, almost without imagination. For a lock intention of “normality” he is conformed, without faith, to the political ideas of fascism,becoming an operator of the Secret Service for the repression of the antifascism. The turbid infancy (to which the memory of a mad father and a corrupt and frivolous mother is added) it is by now railing: Marcello is entered in the dresses of the “conformist”, of the “normal man”.
He marries a girl, Giulia, who he thinks of good family (but that before becoming his wife has been the lover of an old friend of family, further to have had lesbian relationship with a woman) and with her he departs for the trip of wedding to Paris. But the trip is the screen where the mission given him by the Secret Service is hidden: to track and to kill his old teacher of University, a dangerous antifascist, who plots against the regime in French land.
Marcello finishes the crime accompained by an assassin, killing the teacher and his wife. But he discovers that his normality is a unusual invention: in Paris, at first Marcello will have a relationship with Lina, the teacher’s wife, betraying so Giulia disavowing his conformism, then he repeats the experience had with the driver with a stranger. At the end with the fall of the fascist regime he will warn his homicide gesture as void and futile, an useless and inopportune crime.
All the castle of purity, of innocence, and of conformism collapses ruinosly: and the crisis is more agburdened by his return to Rome with Giulia; to Villa Borghese he tries to have a natural embrace with his wife that dips him in a state of total abandonment, but a new fact arrives to upset his illusions of normality: Lino the driver who he tought to have killed, arrives in front of him in the dresses of a night watcher of the park. And this is the epilogue in redeeming key: Marcello and Giulia, with their daughter Lucilla, in the escape from Rome to Abruzzo, find the death in a shooting. Also belonging to the pessimistic seam the conformist is a political practice, in a religious key, with narrative superstructures as a niovel of appendix.
The man’s loneliness is manifested, in the novel, with Marcello’s desire, absurd and impassioned, to go out from a privileged condition to muddle himself with the mass, or to appropriate himself of a reality considered still healthy and genuine.
Marcello who becomes a fascist for conformism and that doesn’t hesitate to become a criminal to reach an apparent normality, is the incarnation of a mentality that in the political, intellectual or ideology conformism finds its reason of life.
And nevertheless, over the political ideology, the intrigue of the novel, abstracteness of many situations, the casuistic of the innumerable sexual behaviors, the conformist contains pages quite resulted, as that on the parisian prostitute, or events of a certain narrative relief as Marcello’s meeting with his mother, before his marriage, or that happy image of the desolation of the “conformist” compared to the shade of a lake surpassed by a mountain.