O inexorável ciclo da vida: a inevitabilidade da natureza humana no conto Desforra, em Objecto Quase, de José Saramago

Abstract

Considering the importance of José Saramago for Portuguese and global literature, the present work aims to analyze the short story “Desforra”, which makes up the work Objecto Quase, and its relationship with the concepts of life drive and death drive coined by Sigmund Freud (2016). To this end, the concept of allegory found in Moisés (2004) is used as an analysis category. This research has a qualitative and bibliographical methodological approach, initially starting from a historical survey of the political context of Portugal at the time of the work's production, taking into account the influence that the post-Carnation Revolution scenario had on it. We seek to observe the representation of the inexorability of what makes us human throughout the stories and, more specifically, in the last of the set, in contrast to the processes of reification of man, driven since the emergence of industry and capitalism. Finally, we see that the young man in the story “Desforra” represents, by giving vent to his sexual impulse after watching the castration scene, the life drive that is inherent and inexorable to human beings, as opposed to the death drive, which is equally inevitable, represented by the group that emasculates the animal.