Intellect

Authors:  Elena Lombardi 
DOI: 10.1386/seci.6.2-3.113/1

Keywords
De Sica, Bicycle Thieves, neorealism, picaresque novel, alienation, fetishism

Abstract
‘Of Bikes and Men’ explores the intersections of three (and the same) narratives within De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), one of the masterpieces of Italian neorealism. It interprets Bicycle Thieves as a quest narrative with a picaresque slant (one flexible enough to accommodate diverse quest narrative such as Dante's Comedy or Cervantes' Qixote) and reveals the existence within the film of a Marxist narrative of alienation, whereby the bicycle follows the Marxist trajectory from object to commodity, and a Freudian tale of fetishism, within which the irretrievable bike, obsessively sought in the repetition of dismembered bike-parts, stands for the irretrievable maternal phallus. The three narratives intersect on a bridge, the locus classicus of the quest narrative, testifying to the ambiguity and indecidability of the message of Bicycle Thieves.