De Bentinho a Casmurro: um olhar sob a perspectiva do bildungsroman

Abstract

The novel Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis, over a hundred and twenty-one years of existence, has been investigated by literary criticism from different perspectives because it presents disturbing characteristics and predominantly marked by “psychological realism”. The work is narrated by Bento Santiago, who, as a casmurro, presents facts of his life from childhood to adulthood. In this sense, the novel is built from a discourse in which the narrator hides facts, in order to shape the possible impressions that the reader might have about him and, to the same extent that he shapes these impressions, forms the personality he wants to present. Therefore, the present work aims to analyze the development of the character Bentinho from the perspective of studying the formation novel, in German Bildungsroman. The formation novel is understood as a modality of romance that considers the life trajectory of the protagonist in all its phases and evidences his desire for formation, adaptation to the world and socialization. Thus, considering the trajectory presented in Dom Casmurro's discourse, Franco Moretti's studies (1999) and Bakhtin's (1997) considerations regarding of the formation novel, we recognize it as a possible reading key for the compression of the narrator and character Bento Santiago, from Machado.