The Lonely Narrator’s Journey

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The lonely, alienated young male narrator is a common figure in literature across time and place. Readers encounter him in the unnamed, frenzied protagonist who stalks around Christiania in Knut Hamsun’s ; in Leopold Bloom as he wanders James Joyce’s Dublin in; and in , who ditches his boarding school for New York City. In Osamu Dazai’s 1948 cult-classic novel, , which turns 75 this year, the protagonist Yozo Oba might bring some of these characters to mind as he whiles away his days in 1930s Tokyo. Like some of these other narrators, he is adrift in the world, espousing a “pessimistic view of social humanity,” .