John Fante's Ask the Dust: Between art and self-dramatisation

Abstract

In John Fante's Ask the Dust, Arturo Bandini's ambition to become a great writer overrides his disadvantages as the son of Italian immigrants searching for his place in American society. With cocksure arrogance he cultivates the fantasy self-image of a confident womaniser to compensate for his lack of sexual experience. His inability to confront reality without distorting its features through his wild fantasies continually frustrates his attempts to write a novel as a follow-up to his short story The Little Dog Laughed. Criticism on the novel has traced his moral transformation from egotism to empathy without, however, taking into proper consideration Bandini's idea of himself as an author and the manner in which Fante constructs a series of narrative voices to create a self-dialogue within the text between the older Bandini as narrator and the younger Bandini as protagonist.