Confessions of a confidence man12/26/2023 Deeming himself outside of social morals, and as an illusionist, he thus sees freedom as ‘a necessity completely irreconcilable with any kind of commitment to a grossly factual situation’ because to ‘live symbolically spells true freedom ‘(93-4). He also distances himself from the dominant, bourgeois, ‘ordinary bad taste’ (169) which has the effect of making him regard himself as ‘asocial’ (94). Mid-way in the novel Krull is shown reflecting that ‘the real I could not be identified because it actually did not exist’ (205.) Later, in the role of the Marquise he visits a circus in Lisbon and identifies with the clowns, seeing himself as an ‘entertainer and illusionist’ (174). Even when Krull actively assumes the role of well-off ‘man of distinction’ in his hours off from being lift-boy this is really enabled by the money he gets from selling jewels that had been dropped into his case at a French border control. But Krull’s key confidences, as pimp, call boy, and as Marquise are more or less pushed on him by other characters. And in the more lowly roles that he has as an employee: kitchen hand, hotel liftboy and waiter, he has a tendency for consciously acting in them, rather like what 1960’s sociologists of class and status referred to as ‘role-distance’. Krull has a natural understanding of the arbitrary nature of social status and professional roles, and this gives him little conscience about assuming the role of Marquise de Venosta - the key confidence trick occurring in the novel. I read this in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of 1976 with a detail of Kirchner’s Self Portrait with model on the cover.
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