O absurdo na obra de Donald Barthelme: um estudo de três contos

Abstract

This undergraduate thesis aims to analyze how the absurd is built and manifests itself in three short stories by the American writer Donald Barthelme (1931-1989), namely: The Leap, I bought a little city and Paraguay. These texts were chosen based on the criterion of the possibility of exploring different literary strategies used by the author to build the absurd, as well as the opportunity to publicize Donald Barthelme’s work in Brazil, since two of the short stories analyzed here have no translation to Brazilian Portuguese. To achieve the proposed goal, this work sets three specific aims: firstly, it presents a discussion about the term “absurd” in its different meanings in philosophy (Kierkegaard 1980, 1992; Sartre, 2011; Camus, 2018) and in literature (Esslin, 2018; Gavins, 2013; Bennett, 2009, 2015, 2024), the latter taking into account its formal and thematic variation; secondly, it examines Donald Barthelme’s life in conjunction with the historical moment when the short stories were written, as well as a reflection about the literary trends that were in vogue at that time and that influenced the author; thirdly, it analyzes the three short stories abovementioned, considering the concatenation of form and content in the chosen texts as part of an aesthetic project that aims for a specific end, which is, in this work in particular, the construction and the manifestation of the absurd. Thanks to the nature of the proposed aim and the steps taken to achieve it, this research is a qualitative and comparative study bringing together the fields of philosophy and literature. This work concludes with the assertion that the absurd manifests itself at different levels of intensity and of impact in the form and in the thematic development of the analyzed short stories. Moreover, the construction of the absurd in those texts involves the use of literary strategies, such as incongruity, non sequitur and the destruction of the referent, which seek to highlight some disconcerting points in the theme of each of these short stories.