The events between 8 September 1943 and February 1945 form the historical backdrop of the novel.
These are the years of the partisan war.
An officer cadet in Rome, Johnny left the army, like so many others following the announcement of the armistice and the ensuing general chaos.
He returned home, to Alba.
A young intellectual passionate about English literature, he belongs to a lower-middle-class family.
His parents would have him hide quietly, without exposing himself.
But the young man decides to abandon

a fluid position, remediable from any fatal impact through pretense, subterfuge, or cunning

, taking a stand instead

in the great dualism at the price of immediate, unquestionable execution

.
And then

he set out for the highest hills, the ancestral land that would aid him in its motionless possible, in the vortex of the black wind...
in the name of the authentic people of Italy, to oppose fascism, to judge and execute, to decide militarily and civilly

.
He stumbles upon a Garibaldini brigade, tied to the communists.
Like many of his comrades, political ideologies do not interest him; what matters is fighting fascism.
He meets Tito, a shrewd young peasant, so far removed from him in culture and social origins, yet so close in partisan brotherhood.
He was

happy and eager to mingle with the men, with all of them.
They had fought with him, had been born and lived, each with their own origin...
to find themselves together in that battle

.
He kills his first man:

the boy was dancing thirty meters away, blinded by his own courage...
Johnny shot him without haste, without ferocity....
he propped himself up on his elbows in an ascensional suspension before his first dead man

.
The clash with the fascists breaks up the brigade, too poorly armed to resist.
Johnny goes in search of another partisan formation and encounters the so-called badogliani, closer to his own political sensibilities.
He finds a bourgeois environment more familiar to him, and it is with them, in the hill villages around Alba, that he spends the long stalemate of the winter of 1943–1944.
Although better organized and equipped than the Garibaldini units, they are utterly unprepared to withstand the joint fascist and German offensive in the summer of 1944.
The struggle is brutal and unequal.
Johnny sees many of his comrades die and is reduced to a small core, including his friends Pierre and Ettore, with whom he takes refuge in a farmhouse.
Yet Pierre flees to the city, where hiding is easier, while Ettore is captured along with the peasant woman who had sheltered and fed them.
Desperate and alone, he faces the long, bitter winter of 1944–1945.
He hides in the wildest reaches of the woods, in the ravines carved out by torrents, occasionally seeking food and shelter from the peasants, who are themselves exhausted and terrified.

His heart broke with longing for the ancient community, that factious, reproachable, at times repellent community, and for the old battlegrounds and the companionship of the living, the dead, the captured...
He yearned to regroup, he would have given half his blood for it, Where is Nord (the partisan commander's nom de guerre)...
January 31st is an absurd date to reunite.
That morning you will rise and call out, but only the silence of the hills will answer you

.
By the end of the winter, very little remains of the naive, idealistic student.
The loss of his dearest friends, the massacres he was forced to witness, the cold, the hunger, the squalor have turned him into a solitary fighter.
When, in January 1945, the partisan ranks begin to reorganize and swell once more (with the Allies' final advance now drawing near),

Johnny was no longer at home there; that patch, far from fading, was widening.
He could no longer endure fellowship or routine; he skirted collectivity, patrols, and sentry duty

.
The naive cry, “Long live us!, forever until the end of human history,” which he had voiced when feeling profoundly united with his comrades, has transformed into a sense of dissatisfaction, of disillusionment with others, driving him to disobey and seek a brave and solitary death.

The novel is the ideal sequel to Primavera di bellezza, another of Fenoglio's masterpieces.
While in that book the author chronicled the political maturation of a young man becoming aware of what fascism was and of the need to bear an individual witness of rebellion, in Il partigiano Johnny Fenoglio recounts a young man's partisan journey and how the events of the war and the harshness of the environment left an indelible, unpredictable imprint on his character.
While remaining steadfast in his determination to “say no all the way,” never to surrender, by the war's end Johnny can no longer feel part of a broader community—the partisan army—desiring instead to fight the fascists alone, like a solitary hero.
And as one reads on, both the language and the relationship between Johnny and his surroundings evolve.
If at the beginning of the novel the prose is steeped in English words, as if to convey the protagonist's literary realm, the Anglo-Saxon terms gradually grow scarcer, until Johnny eventually betrays his beloved English tongue, rejecting the role of interpreter in favor of that of a combatant.
Similarly, the hill country begins as a backdrop, only to take on an increasingly prominent role as protagonist as the story progresses, almost melding with Johnny's new persona.
The woods, the ravines, the villages perched on the mountains, the fog and the frost, the peasant world with its livestock and its dogs, fierce or friendly, become the protagonist's new reality as, like a modern-day Robin Hood, he wages his solitary battle against the villains.
In this respect, Fenoglio's book is a magnificent narrative of the Resistance—not the rhetorical one intended to exalt collective history and the emergence of a national consciousness.
Paradoxically, the trajectory in the novel is reversed: from a civic and political vision, however naive and unrefined, the protagonist arrives at an individualistic and disenchanted conception of the idealized partisan war.

Fenoglio's immense fascination lies in the expressive creativity of his language:

an ungrammaticalized language, ductile, capable of being dismantled and reassembled in its constituent elements with extraordinary fluidity...
a magmatic language with which to collaborate creatively.
The result is a prose incessantly yielding lexical, morphological, and syntactic neologisms

(Dante Isella: La lingua del partigiano Johnny).
It could have marked an intriguing direction of development for Italian literature.
No one followed it, squandering the opportunity to inject fresh, original vitality into a language as stagnant as Italian had become.

A weakness of the novel lies in its lack of compactness, leading to a narrative plot that is often sprawling.
The relentless focus on the protagonist fails to provide dynamism and dialectic to the system of characters, who, in turn, lack sufficient depth and autonomy to counter the overbearing presence of Johnny's character.
It is an epic and individualistic book par excellence.

Why read it? It is a fascinating book, above all for its language.

Johnny the Partisan