Ausências e interferências discursivas: um estudo sobre os narradores-personagens dos romances Dois Irmãos e Relato de um certo oriente, de Milton Hatoum

Abstract

This study examines the category of the narrator in the Milton Hatoum’s novel Two brothers. The book discusses, through the characterization of a character-narrator son of an Indigenous woman, issues related to the subject in modernity, an individual who faces the contradictions and asymmetries of a new social space and time ruled by classicist determinations and who is marked by losses and identity search. The structural genesis of the narrative as well as the characters point out that now disjointed reality in which human beings live all marked by absences and gaps, whatever social or identitarian. However, unlike the narrator's characterization of the author's first novel, Tale of a certain orient, who is discursively absent in the narrative of the reports which had the job of rescuing her past all lived among a family of Arabian immigrants, Two brothers’ narrator-protagonist constantly interfere and seek to position himself related to those reports and events that labeled his destination, using them as a tool for self knowledge and transformation of the reality that afflicts him. When the centrality of narrative is given to a historically inferior stratum of identity victimized by various prejudices, which gives it the capacity for reflection and interference on the faced social causes, the novel Two brothers updates and resizes, on the subject of the Latin-American and Brazilian social contexts, the theme of the problematic narrator as well as the condition of subject in modernity that, according Luckacs, carries with it a gap between its interiority and the world around, amidst the changes and contradictions of reality. Besides this first critical theoretical analysis, this study also beholds and joins to analysis Stuart Hall’s theoretical formulations, which very precisely point out the fragmentation and the crisis of identity of the subject brought up in the modernity, causing the subject’s instability of feelings and its lack of unit.