Placing opposing ideas or words side by side, so that one lights up the other through contrast.
In One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand
Instead, the thought fixed itself in me that I was not for others what until then, inside myself, I had imagined myself to be.
The sentence sets against each other what he was "for others" and what, "inside me," he had imagined himself to be. The contrast between the image from outside and the one from inside organizes the doubt and shows where it comes from.
I assure you, on the contrary, that at the very moment he was politely saying good morning or good evening to me from outside, on the stairs, inside he made me live as a perfect imbecile.
Book II: The reader and the house, Vitangelo Moscarda, on the elderly tenant who lives in his house
Ah, there it is: a usurer to the others; a fool here, to Dida, my wife. I was Gengè; a fool here, in her mind and before my wife's eyes.
It's all here, I thought, in this subjugation. Each one wants to impose on others the world he carries within, as if it were outside, and that everyone should see it his own way, and that others cannot be in it except as he sees them.
Book IV: The first experiment, Vitangelo Moscarda, thinking about Firbo's quarrel with Turolla
Well, but this, precisely this, was the “vital point” wounded in me, which blinded me and at that moment took from me the understanding of everything: that I was not a usurer, that usurer I had never been for myself, and now I no longer wanted to be one even for others, and would no longer be one, even at the cost of the ruin of every condition of my life.
Book V: The vital point, Vitangelo Moscarda, on the reason he cannot tell Quantorzo
To whom should I say “I”? What good was it to say “I,” if for others it had a meaning and a value that could never be mine; and for me, so far outside the others, taking on one (meaning) at once became the horror of this emptiness and this solitude?
Book VI: Saying "I" to whom, Vitangelo Moscarda, alone in the emptied room after Dida's departure
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