Automat

Automat is a collection of short stories by Albert Moravia, published in 1962–1963, containing 41 stories (some previously published in newspapers). This is Moravia's most concentrated exploration of existential alienation and dehumanization in modern society – the characters are "automats", people who no longer act from inner motivation, but mechanically react to external impulses, like soulless machines.

The main theme is the inability to act proactively, passivity in the face of problems (love, crisis, death, sex). The protagonists are mostly middle-class men, intellectuals or ordinary citizens – they observe life from afar, with no will to change. For example, a man who cannot end a boring relationship, a husband who tolerates his wife's cheating, a person who cannot face loss, or those who surrender to routine and fetishes (money, objects, the body) as a substitute for meaning.

Here, Moravia precisely dissects post-war Italy and the West in the era of consumer society: alienation from oneself and others, sex as a mechanical act, the impossibility of real communication, the domination of objects over the subject (fetish as the title metaphor). The stories are short, dry, introspective - often in the first person, with an emphasis on internal monologue and absurd situations. There is no heroism or catharsis; endings are bitter, resigned or cynical.

This collection continues the motifs from Boredom and Roman Stories, but goes deeper into the psychological and existential crisis - it anticipates later themes of alienation in modernity (influence on postmodern literature). Critics point out that Moravia here shows the "automation" of human behavior in capitalist society: people become objects, without free will. The style is minimalistic, precise, without pathos – the form of a short story perfectly matches the theme of a mechanical, repetitive life.

The collection is often singled out as one of his most radical collections of stories. It represents the peak of Moravia's "psychological" phase of the 1960s, where the focus shifts from social criticism to a profound crisis of identity and meaning in modern man.