O passado no chão do presente em Caetés, São Bernardo e Angústia

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the characters João Valério, Paulo Honório and Luís da Silva, from the respective books Caetés (1933), São Bernardo (1934) and Angústia (1936), by Graciliano Ramos, before the remembrance process that the narrators, in the first person, conduct. These are, therefore, characters who tell their past. So, this bibliographic and inductive research is based on the theoretical formulations of memory and trace according to Plato (2001), Aristotle (1962), Ricœur (2007), Todorov (2000), Bergson (1991), Halbwachs (1990), Bosi (1994), Benjamin (2006; 2012a; 2012b), among others. Such readings indicate that memories are made up of images according to who seeks them, which points to their dynamic, to the tracks impregnated in the soul and, expressly, to the constitutive trait of selection of memory. Based on these discussions and according to the analyzes undertaken in this research, we say that the characters and their studied remembrance processes go through different strands because of their singularities of the past, which differ even in the narrated periods of time, but intertwine at the same step which converge on a past from which the irremediable feelings of anguish and failure exasperate the present of the bookkeeper, the farmer and the civil servant. The characters, Luísa, Madalena and Marina, are aware of the injustice of the world due to the inferior social condition in which they find themselves and which lead them to deeper questions about existence from their looks at the past. The life stories narrated by each of them go through complicated love relationships from which it is possible to elucidate the paths taken to feel, in the present, the inner disarray of a loser.