Seven Floors By Dino Buzzati

Italian novelist, Dino Buzzati, in his story, “Seven Floors,” describes the struggles a man, Giovanni Corte, has with his slight illness in a sanatorium. According to the story, the seven floors of the sanatorium are separated based on the “gravity of their state;” the seventh floor is for the extremely mild cases while the first floor are for the casses the doctors can’t fix. Self-serving bias, described in module four, is defined as the tendency to perceive oneself favorably. The story begins with an example of this, “Although his was an extremely slight case;” the readers don’t actually know if Giovanni Corte is an extremely slight case and he may be describing himself in a more favorable light. Another concept relating to the self-serving …show more content…
“For reasons that the nurse was unable to explain, he had been classed among the more ‘serious’ patients on the sixth floor and so had to go down to the fifth,” he always presumed that the reason he was moving floors was because an outside force was making him and not himself. Because of this, Giovanni Corte eventually developed learned helplessness. Learned helplessness, described in module five, is the sense of hopelessness and resignation learned when a human thinks they have no control over repeated bad events; many elderly patients in nursing homes develop this because they usually have little control over their health and treatments. “It was a result of this execrable mistake, then, that he was removed to his last resting place: he who basically, according to the most stringent medical opinion, was fit for the sixth, if not the seventh floor as far as his illness was concerned! The situation was so grotesque that from time to time Giovanni Corte felt inclined simply to roar with laughter,” Corte couldn’t control the nurses and doctors continually moving him down floors so he eventually gave