Plot
Abandoned by his wife, the narrator sits in an empty apartment with covered furniture. He says he has had an experience and is now searching for the story that goes with it. He tries on stories like clothes. Each “I” that speaks, he says, is only a role; every person invents for themselves the story they take to be their life. As an example, he tells of the milkman who goes mad because his identity has worn out and he cannot come up with a new one, and of the self-styled unlucky fellow who would rather lose his lottery winnings than change his self-image.
He invents a man named Theo Gantenbein, who is at risk of going blind after a car accident. When his bandages are removed, he can see, but he now plays the role of the blind man. Equipped with a white cane and dark glasses, he no longer has to respond to the world as it is, no longer has to acknowledge what he sees. Since no one fears his control or judgment anymore, his popularity and social standing grow.
When Gantenbein steps in front of a car driven by a woman named Camilla Huber, he does not have to recognize her as a prostitute. The blind man visits her regularly for manicures and tells her “true” stories. He tells her about the man who receives his own obituary and attends his own funeral. He tells her the fairy tale of the shepherd Ali and his blind wife Alil. Camilla realizes that Gantenbein is not blind, but she promises to keep silent if he also keeps silent about her. A dentist wishes to marry her, but on the eve of the wedding she is murdered. The accusation falls on a well-known personality, already disgraced by the publication of letters addressed to Camilla. Gantenbein, summoned as a witness in court, had seen the accused at the time of the crime, but he withholds the alibi in order not to give up his blind role.
The narrator also invents other figures: Felix Enderlin and František Svoboda. Enderlin, unexpectedly offered a post at Harvard but also convinced he is terminally ill, is incapable of playing a role and fears nothing more than repetition and monotony. When he meets a woman, he already knows in advance how the relationship will unfold. Svoboda, a towering Bohemian whose wife Lila begins an affair with Enderlin, travels alone and waits stoically for her decision—whether she will live by his side, by the other’s, or alone.
All three men cross paths in their connection to a woman named Lila, an actress loved by all three. Gantenbein compares his relationship with her to that of Philemon and Baucis. At first, both are happy. As a blind man, he need not notice her infidelity, and Lila need not pretend in front of him. She overlooks every sign that he can see. Yet the hints of her unfaithfulness weigh on him more and more.
The relationship between Gantenbein and Lila could end when a young acting student visits her—whom Gantenbein takes for his rival—and he locks him in the bedroom with Lila, after which she refuses to live with a madman. Lila might also have a daughter, but Gantenbein is tormented by the suspicion that a certain Mr. Siebenhagen is the father. When he finally confesses to Lila that he has been able to see all along, she feels betrayed and rejects him.
In the end, the narrator tells Camilla a story about a man from Zurich who wanted to die without leaving behind a name or a story. The dead man almost succeeded in drifting nameless down the Limmat River in his coffin. Facing his own death, the narrator is interrogated by a voice asking which of his characters he himself has been. When he returns to the present, it seems to him as though none of it had really happened. He sits beneath the late summer sun of the south, enjoying life.
