Arturo Vivante's The Cricket is a lonely tale of an English professor who is physically, emotionally, and intellectually unsettled by his move to a new teaching position. It is a story that is reminiscent of much of Vivante's short fiction in terms of the overall compactness of the piece and the sense of dislocation that lingers throughout the work as elements of nostalgia and displacement foster a subtle, honest pathos.

Emilio Buti, the new professor "that had come early, taking literally the college's recommendation to arrive right after Labor Day," has lost companionship, country, and confidence in his change of residence. While he is an intellectual that seems to have been brought a great distance to teach amid the erudite, he is also a foppish man, nervous about his surroundings and his place in the academic world of ideas. He sits in his car alone to listen to the news; he nervously scratches down a reading list of high-brow literature as if he were a freshman yearning for acceptance from the larger minds; he doubts his vocation and finds solace in the singular, simple sound of a cricket chirping in his sink.

But this story of an effete intellectual is not without genuine empathy as Vivante is careful to distance his protagonist's insecurity from the realm of the pathetic. If not literally a foreigner, the protagonist is clearly set up as an outsider. The reader is lead to believe that Buti is either an Italian immigrant or a descendant of one--his nostalgia for his home by the sea with Italian coffee and European house wares, his particular embarrassment over not being familiar of a book about Dante, and his authentic Italian name all point to an immediate Italian heritage (not to mention that Vivante's protagonists are often Italian men who immigrated to America, as he did). Emilio is jarred by his new surroundings, left alone to question his ability as a teacher, but it is in the natural world around him that he finds the companionship and the music of being that resonates within him, that brings him back to his home, that tums where he is into every place:

Emilio wants to disappear like the cricket hiding in the sink who is only heard, never located. never seen. He walks into a corn field where he is invisible amid the tall stalks because "It was good to hide in freedom, as in a wood." He is called by owls and serenaded by woodpeckers. Outside the natural world, the teacher of writing is overpowered by the book-wormish teacher of theory, yet Buti is not entirely powerless. He hears the cricket, and perhaps will continue to hear it beyond the moment of its demise beneath his contemporary's shoe. Emilio destroys his reading list in a moment of self-hood, discarding his lessons from Thaddeus Dolmen as if they were mere noise that would drown out the sound of life that buzzed around him.