I’m absolutely alone in this strange city, and I have a bad foot. I don’t dare even move for fear of precipitating yet another crisis. I breathe softly, and think carefully. No sudden ideas, the shock could be fatal. It’s a poor kind of protagonist really who just lies around on his bed.

I pace up and down from one wall to the other talking to myself like a patient in a mental hospital. That naked body I catch sight of every time I pass the mirror makes me feel like throwing up. The grey flesh with its covering of black hairs somehow attracts me and disgusts me at the same time.

Why is my skull covered with hair? To make it look like my genitals?

Other people aren't like me in the slightest, I find. I admit though I prefer to know they are happy, just to be on the safe side. If not, they can be dangerous. I don't like seeing their blood, not at all, nor their guts, all that disgusts me. And if anyone deserves pity, it's me. The others will have to manage by themselves. They weren't any worse off before I was born, and they won't be any better off after I'm dead.

He considered both doctors and nurses as monsters of insensitivity, in spite of the fact that he admired their devotion to duty.

When he lifted the cover of one of the trash cans, before emptying the contents of his own pail into it, he was always astonished by its neatness and order. His own trash was the most indecent collection in the entire building. Repugnant and despicable. There was no resemblance between it and the honest, day-to-day trash of the other tenants. That had a solid, respectable appearance, and his did not.

Trelkovsky had never undestood why people insisted on comparing the noise of birds to music. Birds don't sing, they scream. And in the morning they scream in chorus.

My spirit is incapable of raising itself up from the floor. Divine gravity dictates this law to me: as my body resides at ground level, there must my soul rot.

His stomach turned inside out, like a glove, and he vomited.    It wasn't disagreeable at all. Almost like a liberation, in fact. A kind of suicide, in a way. These particles of matter that showered from his mouth, after he had thought them consumed and digested, did not disgust him. No, he was completely indifferent to them; and to everything else, for that matter. It was only when he vomited that he could be indifferent even to life itself.

Already, he was not entirely Trelkovsky any more. But what was Trelkovsky? How could he learn the answer to that? He had to discover himself, so that he could be sure he would not wander from the right path. But how?