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Moscarda’s wife, Dida, tells him that his nose was asymmetrical. Looking in the mirror, he realizes that she was telling the truth and then notices the many other imperfections. How was it that he never noticed before? He begins to believe the man in the mirror was a stranger.

“This was the way in which I wanted to be alone. Without myself. I mean to say, without that self which I already knew, or which I thought I knew. Alone with a certain stranger, from whom I darkly felt that I should be able never more to part, and who was myself: the stranger inseparable from me. There was, then, one only that interested me! And already, this one, or the need I felt of being alone with him, of confronting him in order to know him better and hold a little converse with him, was working me up to a pitch of half-shivering alarm.”

His wife, Dida, calles Moscarda “Genga” and Moscarda begins to believe that “Genga” was another man.

“How many times, by chance, had I confronted my eyes in a mirror, with someone who stood looking at me in the same mirror. I in the mirror did not see myself, but was seen; and the other person, similarly, did not see himself, but saw my face and saw himself being looked at by me. Had I been able to project myself in such a manner as to be able, the I in the mirror, to see myself, I should perhaps have been visible still to the other person, but I- no- I should no longer be able to see him. One could not, at one and the same time, see one's self and see another who stood looking at one and the same mirror.”

Moscarda forsakes his father’s inheritance and leaves his wife Dida.

“No name. No memory today of yesterday's name; of today's name tomorrow. If the name is the thing, if a name in us is the concept of everything that is situated without us….very well, then, let men take that name which I once bore and engrave it as an epitaph on the brow of that pictured me that they beheld; let them leave it there in peace, and let them not speak of it again. For a name is no more than that, an epitaph. Something befitting the dead. One who has reached a conclusion. I am alive, and I reach no conclusion. Life knows no conclusion. Nor does it know anything of names….Living wholly without, a vagabond….I am dying every instant, and being born anew and without memories: alive and whole, no longer in myself, but in everything outside.”