The book Zeno's Conscience starts with the Preamble written by the psychiatrist of Zeno, accusing to the readers that Zeno was not at all being a reasonable patient in his own process of psychoanalysis. However, in the last chapter of the book Psychoanalysis, Zeno gave the readers a different perspective that the psychiatrist might be the one who was constantly making presumptions and made Zeno sicker than he had ever been. Whether whose opinion is more favored by the scale of truth is left to be judged by the readers, as the story unveiled.
In the first story Smoke, Zeno appeared as indecisive, a person of weak will: hating what nicotine can do to his health, he thought of various methods to try to get over the bad habit: finding a special date or event to have that last cigarette (including his father's death, switching his department of study in university, ) and recording it, and even getting into a rehab-like castle arranged by a licensed doctor in the end, but still failing to get over the addiction. He regarded smoking as bad as a disease, and he attempted to justify his reasons of not being able to get over the addiction. "To reduce its outlandish appearance, I even tried to give a philosophical content to the last-cigarette disease" (Svevo 13). But the paradox might not lies in his weak will, but his constant seek of a break-through: that he always want to be free of not smoking, breaking the rule he set for himself. And after breaking the rule, feeling guilty and condemned, he tried to seek for the philosophical meanings behind his acts. He is indeed very curious about himself, as the doctor said in the Preamble, but probably because he has so many paradoxes embedded in his . He casts doubt on himself: why did he never succeeded in quitting smoking, why did his father "slap" him right before his death, whether he in sane or insane...
I think Svevo doesn't only leave it to the readers to determine whether Zeno is legitimately mentally ill--i think he makes deliberate choices in the style and progression of the novel to allow the reader to see that Zeno is quite insane. I would agree that his mental state, as well as his reliability decrease as the novel progresses, but this is undoubtedly due to Svevo's choice to make the novel epistolary: we only get Zeno's thoughts and feelings, apart from the Doctor's preface. I do not think that Zeno actually hates smoking; instead, I think he uses it as a justification for his other faults. He says "did I perhaps love cigarettes so much because they allowed me to blame them for my clumsiness?" (Svevo 12). Zeno is constantly finding excuses for his behaviors--all of which justify physical illnesses but never mental illness. His denial of his mental illness serves as further evidence of its existence.
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