Colin Wilson’s fourth novel, which appeared as
Man Without a Shadow: The Diary of an Existentialist(1963) in the UK and under the rather more lurid title of
The Sex Diary of Gerard Sormein the USA, is a lively exploration of its narrator’s (and Wilson’s) ideas about the potential of the human mind to transform men into godlike creatures who will embody the next stage of human evolution and about sexuality as one means of glimpsing this potential. As its US (and, later, British) title suggests, its protagonist is the same as that in Wilson’s first novel,
Ritual in the Dark(1960), and it takes the form of an intimate journal rather than that of the third-person narrative used in
Ritual(Sorme will feature again as the protagonist in Wilson’s ninth novel,
The God of the Labyrinth…
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Man Without a Shadow: the diary of an existentialist". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 May 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23918, accessed 27 November 2024.]
