The meaning of Edgardo's journey in Bassani's The Heron

Now further along in Giorgio Bassani's The Heron (1968, Weaver tr.), it is apparent that the novel in its Joycean manner will comprise a day in the life of the protagonist, Edgardo, as he leaves his comfortable home in the predawn to go into the country for a day of hunting. But he is waylaid numerous times on his journey - starting at home when his wife speaks to him as he's trying to get out and then as he sits w/ his "concierge" for a cup of coffee; later, when he hits the road, he feels an urgent need to defecate so stops in a small town and pays a visit to a hotel, which is run by a fascist who served w/ E during the war (WWII) - and the interruptions of his journey toward the hunting grounds continue, in an almost comic manner (through the course of all these delays we learn much about E's life and about the political state of Italy in the years after the war; the novel is set in 1947). E's journey reminds me in a way of the journey from Stockholm to Lund in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, with the journey, much delayed and waylaid, unfolding the life of the elderly professor on his way to receive a prize. We have to wonder if there's a symbolic or allegorical significance to E's journey: What is he hunting for? When is he in flight from? It's a strange "version" of the pastoral, as he's not going from city to country for the scenic beauty of love of nature; he's heavily armed, and is traveling to the country to shoot and kill for sport. In the background, there was the fascism and anti-Semitism of the war years, which E., a Jew, has endured and survived (through some chicanery), and in the present there is a strong communist force at work in Italy during recovery, with attendant hatred of landowners such as E. I recommend that readers look up an image of the car he is driving, an Aprilia; I'd pictured the car to be a small, cut car of dubious reliability, much like the Fiat 500 that I'd rented in Italy, but in fact the Aprilia looks to be a large, luxury car, something like a Bentley - when changes my image of his driving through the countryside - a natural target for class rage; we understand his fear.