The Colomber By Dino Buzzati

Reading Dino Buzzati's Short Story Properly

Dino Buzzati wrote this story while working as a journalist and editor at Corriere della Sera in Milan. He published it in 1966 as part of a larger collection called The Colomber and Other Stories. The original Italian title is Il colomber. The story runs about twelve pages in most English translations and follows a boy who receives a toy boat as a gift, then hears from a fisherman that a sea monster called the Colomber exists — a creature that marks its target and never stops hunting it. The plot is almost absurdly simple on the surface. A child gets a boat. A stranger warns him about a monster. The man spends his entire life chasing that monster, eventually builds a real ship to find it, and confronts it one final time. The ending is brief and has been argued about by professors for decades. Buzzati doesn't explain much of anything.

The Colomber By Dino Buzzati

The story works as an extended meditation on how dread and obsession shape a person's decisions over a lifetime. The Colomber functions as fate personified. Once you know it exists, it exists for you specifically. This follows a pattern Buzzati returns to throughout his work — the idea that certain forces in the world are indifferent to human plans, and awareness of them changes everything. What most readers miss on a first pass is how carefully Buzzati controls the pacing. The fisherman mentions the Colomber almost casually, like weather or a local rumor. The narrator doesn't dramatize the moment. Then Buzzati compresses decades into a few sentences before slowing down again when the protagonist finally boards his ship. The uneven rhythm mirrors how a single fear actually operates in real life — it sits in the background for years, then becomes overwhelming all at once. The story's structure reinforces its theme. Another thing that isn't obvious: Buzzati deliberately avoids explaining the protagonist's psychology. We never get internal monologue about why he feels compelled to hunt the monster. He doesn't give speeches about courage or defiance. He simply acts. That restraint is significant. The story suggests that obsession doesn't require justification. People don't always know why they do what they do, and Buzzati refuses to tidy that up.

When I taught this story to undergraduates a few years ago, I ran into the same problem repeatedly. Students wanted to pin down a single definitive interpretation. They'd ask whether the Colomber represents God, death, guilt, or something else entirely. There are valid arguments for each reading. The trap is picking one and treating it as the answer. The story's resistance to a fixed interpretation is part of what makes it worth returning to. I started telling students to track how the language changes across the narrative instead of hunting for symbols. The shift from concrete childhood details to increasingly abstract and ominous descriptions maps the protagonist's psychological descent without Buzzati ever stating it directly. The ending deserves special attention because people frequently misread it. The protagonist sees the Colomber one final time, speaks to it, and then something happens. Different translations handle this differently. Some suggest the monster destroys the ship. Others imply the protagonist dies without describing the moment. The ambiguity is intentional. Buzzati understood that explaining the ending would collapse the entire story into a simple moral lesson, and that wasn't what he was doing. If you're looking to read the story, it's available through several channels. You can find it in The Colomber and Other Stories, published by various houses including New Directions and Feltrinelli. Individual libraries carry it, and some public domain sources have the original Italian text online. The story is short enough that most anthology editions include it without issue.

There are limitations to what this story can do for a reader. It demands patience with ambiguity, which means it won't satisfy someone looking for narrative closure or clear answers. The allegorical structure also means readers who prefer character-driven plots may find the protagonist underdeveloped. He functions more as a vessel for the central idea than as a fully rendered person. That's a real constraint, and it's worth acknowledging upfront rather than pretending it doesn't exist. For readers who finish it and want to go further, Buzzati's short fiction catalog offers several thematically adjacent stories. Il bastone a due punte and Sessanta notti di vento both explore similar terrain around fate, isolation, and the inability to escape certain outcomes. The film adaptation of Untorella by Luigi Comencini, based on a different Buzzati story, also captures something of his atmosphere if you want to experience his work in another medium.