The novel of the partisan struggle
Vittorini autodidactic literate and not full-grown political man, however, for the political action (even if his activity of antifascist and conspirator of the Resistance is beyond dispute) as narrator he feels the duty to operate for the social life equally, for the polis, promoting a new culture based upon realistic and popular bases, a literature that gives hope and divulge human solidarity. This seems the argument and the fundamental engagement of Uomini e no, as we can infer by the last pages, after Enne 2 has decided to get lost deciding to wait for Cane Nero in his room to kill him, devoting himself to the sacrifice of his life, reducing himself in his room as a mortal machine with two guns in the hands. In those pages he describes us a worker that, involved in a partisan action, doesn't succeed in killing a German youth because he has been touched seeing him too much sad and he has not had the strength to kill his similar, a worker as he is.
Such human solidarity is the sign of the hope that Vittorini sees among men after the war and the partisan struggle. And this whole novel of the partisan struggle, afar from being the epic of the war of liberation, wants to re-create the deep meaning of that human and politic experience, of the final setback of Enne 2 that, seeing frustrated his aspiration to an authentic life, after Berte, the woman he loved, has chosen the man she didn’t love, he decides to lose himself in a kind of heroic suicide, in which the loving desperation is ransomed in the murder of Cane Nero, the terrible Nazi-Fascist that decided to his liking the death of the partisans to offer them to the death or to the meal of his dog.
The Resistance as moral category
For this philosopher partisan what gives a sense to life is the total engagement against the evil of the world. He reasons for moral categories too. The evil of the world is Fascism that represents some men, among which Cane Nero is the most typical representative; to withstand against this evil up to the risk of the life is absolute guarantee of good and of truth. The Resistance, in this sense, from historian and contingent fact, become a moral category, a hope in a better world, in which the evil will disappear. " After all, all Uomini e no is explained in this attempt to render absolute facts and characters that preserve all together their historical connotations. We see it in the aspect that some characters assume, separated in Manich way in good and bad people (just Uomini e no), as Enne 2 on one side and Cane Nero on the other one; or in some dialogues among the partisans...
The technique of the dialogue’s deceleration
The technique of the dialogue’s deceleration, effected through frequent repetitions with the purpose to raise it in a surreal atmosphere, in a fourth dimension, it is very used in the whole progress of the story, sometimes up to give the impression of the falsness, of the method. Many critiques talk, on this subject, of the influence of the American narrative techniques (Saroyan, Faulkner, Hemingway); but it is perhaps more opportune to observe as among the dialogues of Uomini e no and of Conversazione there are no substantial differences (BRIOSI). If the tone of the dialogue is mailed on the adagio’s technique, that is developed here up to the extreme stylistic consequences.