Sarratore Analysis

Sarratore, while not wealthy like the Solaras or the family of Don Achille, is able to provide for his family more easily than most of the families in the neighborhood, and on the surface, he seems the ideal husband and neighbor: unusually helpful around the house, an avid church goer, and helpful to his friends in the community. This conventional image, however, is largely a façade, as he uses it to mask his philandering ways, targeting the most vulnerable women in the neighborhood. As a male, even one who is mocked for his seemingly un-masculine sensitivity and predilection for the arts, he is not questioned in a way that a woman would be, and by bestowing his advances on those with the least recourse to rebuff him, he maintains an unequal …show more content…
Here Sarratore is unscathed, and Melina is dismissed as crazy. Similarly, later in the novel, after Sarratore has moved away from the neighborhood, the protagonist Elena, an adolescent girl on the cusp of womanhood, encounters the Sarratore family again on vacation in Ischia, where she is staying with the cousin of her primary school teacher. At first unable to understand the hatred that Sarratore’s son Nino bears toward his father, Elena soon discovers that Sarratore’s charms (his impeccable manners, his urbane outlook, and his vivacity at family gatherings) are a way of grooming Elena in the same way that he had done with Melina. When Sarratore approaches her late at night after everyone else is asleep, he kisses the shocked Elena full on the mouth, slips his hand quickly into her underpants, and confesses his love for her. As a teenager, Elena is in no position to challenge Sarratore, and he knows this, particularly since Elena is far from home and isolated from anyone who might be tempted to take her