It's Me, Eddie

The main component of the novella is the person’s shattered, crumpled sense of the world—someone who has lost not only a point of support, but has completely lost orientation in the cold world of capitalist objectivity. The hero calls himself Edichka. And if we set aside the grandeur-mania of the author who worships himself, it’s possible that “Edichka” in the text could be the name of a child—weak and defenseless against the circumstances in which he himself, through frivolity, found himself, and who desperately needs protection from a strong, active beginning that would take him under its care and pull him up from the cold pit of American life.

An adult, placed in an alien environment that, as it turns out, is utterly unfamiliar to him, isn’t always much different from a vulnerable child—one whom the indifferent system, without noticing, crushes and slowly digests. Day and night, pushed along by personal immediacy, he wanders through the streets of a big city, hoping to encounter that very event which will fundamentally change everything. In the monstrous depth of his fall, he loses all landmarks, and in a chaotic, insane world the “sun” of his own “I” burns even brighter—remaining the only solid element of this existence, the one from which he draws warmth wherever he may be.

In the end, whatever actions he takes, whatever happens to him—Edichka, reaching those frost-covered palms toward the flame of his own ego—writes about himself as a hero from the first to the last page of the work. This is the description of his life. And by the logic of the character to whom the most space is devoted, he is the hero. So Edichka is the hero.

The world around us? Then we’re at the center of it!