Moravia's Brutal Way of Telling Agostino What Adult World Looks Like

After reading Agostino by Alberto Moravia, I feel really sad for the kid. 

I feel like most of kids nowadays, our sexual awakening is through parenting or school education about sexuality and health. But for Agostino, I would say it is through a forced intrusion and sensory "violence"! 

Among the whole book, what troubled me the most was not Agostino's jealousy of the mom, nor his conflicts with that group of local boys, but the man with six fingers - Saro! I was thinking well, this is a novella. It can happen in the story that someone has six fingers. But the more I think about it, the more I realize – it must has some deeper meanings!

First of all, Agostino grew up in a really typical middle-class world, which I would say is an ordered, complete, logical environment, given by his mother. And the way that he thinks of his mother’s body is “lying there behind him, naked in the sun, was shrouded in a mystery to which he owed the greatest veneration”. But Saro showed up and broke his perfect, complete little world. In my opinion, that extra sixth finger represents kind of surplus but it is reality. It is something out of Agostino's knowledge, that he can not decode with his own existing mind.

Moreover, I feel it strongly when I read how the author Moravia described the 6 fingers: “Agostino felt it close over his own hand not like a hand, but like a steel trap... those six short, thick fingers covered his hand, went all the way around, and met underneath in a grip”. Steel trap holding his hand! The touching does not bring any happiness or comfort but sensory violence I would say.

The most brutal thing happened after Agostino escaped from Saro's boat back to the shore. After feeling that touch, his view of the world became alienated. “He looked at her and no longer saw her as his mother; she had become 'una donna'—a woman, like all the others, a creature with a life of her own, a body that could be touched and desired.” Saro's six fingers means deformity of human bodies, also means Agostino's distorted way of sexual awakening.

From this six fingers' existence in this story, I realized in Moravia's world here, growing up is not smooth and happy. It is really brutal that you suddenly, without any preparation or being cared for, acknowledged that: Oh! Humans can have 6 fingers on one hand. Oh! Humans can have illogical, "excessive", even ugly thoughts and desires.

                                 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion by Francis Bacon, 1994

These paintings focus on an existential horror of human existence, just like the deformity of the six fingers on Saro's hand. These all use an abnormality of physical bodies, stripping the cover of civilization and giving you instinctive fear or disgust.

These are just my opinions. Do you have correction or other different analysis about it?