NOMAD OF THE MIRAGE IN ITALO CALVINO’S “THE MIRROR, THE TARGET”

Escapism in the modern world is a desperate plea for change.Individuals in the present era often use daydreaming and mental distractions as a means to evade their uncertainties and lack of confidence or personality.This allows them to immerse themselves in an adventure that surpasses anything they have previously encountered, except in their imagination.Interlocking Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari's concepts of nomadism, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and lines of flight with the concept of strange attractors from chaos theory, this study investigates Fulgenzio's escape, the protagonist of Italo Calvino's "The Mirror, the Target,'' as a defense mechanism for living under the pressure and repression of social norms and traditions of a capitalist system.It examines how the character, as a result of resistance, distracts from reality and embarks on lines of flight motivated by a desire provoked by a strange attractor, which could be a thing or a person.Trying to catch this imaginative peeping thing/person in the world of the mirror, he goes on deterritorializing points of being to the extent of losing the ability to distinguish reality from imagination.Being vulnerable to be attracted by any attractor, he is left like a rhizome growing nonhierarchically and easy to connect with anything with no specific entry or exit point.Like a nomadic person, Fulgenzio roams a mirage with a fluid identity and tries to locate it in a time without identity.