When his wife casually remarks that he has a right-tipped nose, Vitangelo Moscarda "loses his reality" and realises that "for others I was not what until now, privately, I had imagined myself to be" and that, as a result, "his identity is evanescent, based solely on the shifting perceptions of those around him." As a result, he is both "no one," or without a self, and "one hundred thousand," or the theatre of many selves. Moscarda careens from one catastrophe to the next in his irrational quest for an identity free of the expectations of others and manages to discover freedom even as he is labelled as insane.
