Vitangelo Moscarda is the narrator and protagonist of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand: a twenty-eight-year-old man, rich and idle, heir to the bank his father founded in Richieri, who lives without examining himself until the day his wife tells him his nose leans to the right.
Married to Dida, he left the business to two trusted friends, Quantorzo and Firbo, and never finished anything. His father only saw to it that he married early. Moscarda accepts every path pointed out to him, but lingers at each step around a little stone that others walk past without seeing, and it is this inner life that his wife's remark brings down.
From then on, what he wants changes: first to see himself as others see him, then to dismantle the self his acquaintances have of him, then to be "one," and finally to be nothing that a name can fix. What he fears is being looked at, because each glance hands him an image he can neither know nor prevent. He tells everything in the first person, from the beggars' asylum where he ends up, addressing the reader as "gentlemen."
Where he is mistaken, according to the book, is in believing that a single act is enough to change the image others have of him: the eviction and the gift to Marco di Dio only swap the label of usurer for that of madman. The name Moscarda, which he hears as the buzz of a fly, is what he rejects in the end.