The Madness of the Day, written in 1973 by Maurice Blanchot, is a short, compacted novel in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. It is less a fiction than a voice, a monologue, a mysterious, elliptical narration. The ghostly narrator, hovering between life and death, evokes states of anonymity, poverty, sickness and blindness. He testifies: “As nobody, I was sovereign”. Yet, in this haze, there are sudden, indistinct flashes of drama: abstract moments of violence and intensity happening somewhere, somehow, to someone. At one point, the narrator gets particularly excited when he witnesses a banal yet strangely magical incident on the street involving a woman and her pram. The narrator exclaims:

By the conclusion of his monologue, however, the narrator has collapsed back into morbidity and aimlessness. He retreats from these affects and states that gather in a poetic cluster: the day, light, madness, things happening and rushing to their end. Everyone around his sickbed pressures him to tell his story – but stories, too, are part of the madness of the day. The final words of the narrator, and the final line of Blanchot's text: “A story? No. No stories, never again”.