A tale by Rubens Figueiredo: a dreamlike narrative

Abstract

The fantastic narrative, as stated by Irene Bessièrre, “causes uncertainty to intellectual examination, because it puts into action contradictory data gathered according to a coherence and a complementarity of their own”. The contradictory data added to the ambiguity, to doubt, to the presence of introspective characters, strangers, who seek the self-realization in their relationship with each other are some of the recurring elements in the prose of Rubens Figueiredo. In the tale “Os aneis da serpente”, object of our study, the unusual link between the lives of two characters by the dream puts the reader in the face of a deadlock, since the boundaries between reality and dreamlike states of the protagonist become increasingly blurred. The antagonistic and exclusive relationships of the two significant levels of achievement of the existences unite under the sign of a snake-shaped ring. The analysis in question examines the referring construction procedures seeking to apprehend what is real, unreal or speculate and to what extent the reversal of logical attributes of perception and representation put in check the expectations of the reading. Keywords: fantastic; construction of the unusual; dream; vigil.