The Cloven Viscount

Halving serves as the central symbol of Calvino’s novella, representing the artificial and destructive separation of human moral complexity into pure extremes. When Medardo is literally divided by the cannonball, this physical splitting symbolizes humanity’s tendency toward reductive thinking about good and evil. The narrator explains that “just half of him ha[s] been saved, the right part, which [i]s perfectly preserved, without a scratch on it, except for that huge slash separating it from the left-hand part blown away” (13). This precise division creates two incomplete beings, each representing a moral extreme that proves equally destructive to society. The symbol gains depth through its extension into the natural world, where the Bad ’Un systematically halves every living thing he encounters—pears, mushrooms, flowers, and creatures—reinforcing the unnaturalness of such division.

The symbol directly illuminates the theme of The Necessity of Moral Complexity for Human Wholeness. Both halves, despite their opposing natures, create suffering: the Bad ’Un through cruelty and the Good ’Un through oppressive virtue. The splitting represents what happens when humans attempt to perfect themselves by eliminating supposedly negative aspects of their nature. In the narrative, only through Medardo’s final reunion and restoration does his authentic identity emerge, suggesting that true wisdom comes from integrating rather than segregating the full spectrum of human experience.