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My only exposure to Ionesco (prior to this novel) was through reading and almost performing in "The Bald Soprano". However, some stuff came up during my senior year in high school, and we never got the production off the ground. Additionally, I read an interview with Zero Mostel about performing in "The Rhinocerous". So basically, it wasn't enough to have formed a strong expectation, but it was sufficient for me to feel adequately prepared to handle any of his absurdist tendencies as I started to read his one and only novel, "The Hermit". Surprisingly, it wasn't anything like what I expected. The beginning of the novel is firmly rooted in reality, which was fine by me, until the narrator vanished into his own thoughts, becoming obsessively philosophical upon inheriting some money from a relative. The tedious mental observations rambled on for a while and struck me as the annoyingly naïve pseudo-epiphanies that a freshman-level philosophy major might have as their professor guides them through the evolution of 'deep thinking'. The entire first half of the novel was burdened by this banal alienation that the narrator heaped upon himself while waxing poetic about what the world truly is and how he's trapped in a box within another box within yet another box. Ugh. The second half of the novel maintains the same theme, but Ionesco reduces much of the tedium and injects a touch of the familiar absurdity. In his self-imposed solitude, the narrator begins to [?hallucinate / witness?:] a timeless war being waged around him. The chaos, paranoia, and nihilism reach a peak with a surreal climax that manages to salvage the story to some extent. However, in the end, I wasn't left with any profound realizations. Instead, I was left with a desire to re-read "The Bald Soprano" to understand what it was that fascinated me about Ionesco in high school.
