The originality’s charm of Tre operai is in the presence of new means of human and literary communication: the modern man, discovered by Pirandello and Svevo as the protagonist of a tragic, separating and disorientating reality, is found in Bernari in front of new social facts, the factory and the city, in front of poverty and love suffocated and destroyed by incomprehension”(PESCE).
This novel was written by the author between 1928 and 1929. But the publication took place in the ‘34. Keep track of the delicate historical period in which a rondista and evasive literature of the Nineteenth century was in force, the novel, for its social and realistic content, undoubtedly represented a moment of breakup with the existing fashion.
Obviously some people confused the political-social document with the new page that Bernari succeeded to write and to insert in the vague Neorealistic climate of the time, the others saw in it the triumph of the neorealistic poetic of Verga’s brand.
The genesis of Bernari’s novel is mostly autobiographic, but also political and busy. Hocked in social sense with ideas not in conformity with those of the fascist regime, which he was born in, as it is possible to deduce by the fact that some authoritative newspapers of the epoch refused favorable critiques, supposing that in the novel there were political, dangerous and compromising elements.
In fact neither the occupation of the factories, neither the workers’problems, in the years of Fascism, constituted fundamental and frequent matters for the official fiction. It’s true that Bernari didn’t face worker’s condition as condition of a class in his novel, but human problems of three individuals that are workers: reason for which he still maintaines himself to the here of the social literature.
In the years when Moravia wrote Gli indifferenti and Jovine Ladri di galline and Un uomo provvisorio, just when the official directives of the fascist culture exalted men with a granite and a heroic wish, Bernari effectively contributed to create that problematic and disheroized climate of Gli indifferenti, of the worn out and defeated men, reduced by now to a bankruptcy situation in life, that will characterize Neorealism. It is still a simple denunciation, a testimony of a psychological and social situation in clean crisis, that got off the heroic rhetoric of Fascism in practice and that emptied its social body. The workers that Bernari introduces are, in reality, defeated, whose aspiration is to go out of their condition to enter in the lower middle class world. But certainly the work remains a well clear testimony, through the story of three humble workers and their public and private cases of the worker’s defeat in the years when Fascism was affirmed, and still a document of consciences’disorientation, because the same job is understood or represented as the primary condition of alienation of man by himself and by his similar. “On these alternatives Bernari installs his discourse of narrator, not escaping nevertheless to the temptations of the by that time dying Decadentism: and this appears in the structure of the novel, static in its situation plant. In fact there is in it a given, steady and expected condition, the factory: this exists and a series of things exist, for which this institution lives its impersonal life swallowing men and events to deprive them of every element of human and social distinction”. (PESCE)