O marinheiro (1915/1983):

a comparative reading between Fernando Pessoa e Caio Fernando Abreu

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative reading between the novel O marinheiro (1983), by Abreu, and Pessoa's dramatic poem (1915). "Sailor" refers to movement, however, in both narratives the movement occurs in the internal plane, in the invisible that becomes visible through the subjectivity placed in exile. While two different traditions, modernism in Portugal and Brazilian postmodernity, distance themselves by time and by their extensive political and cultural transformations, they also approach by the intensity and delicacy in portraying, in a dreamlike environment, the anxieties and yearnings of the human being before the existence and the unknown. Observing the implications of the hierarchy of literature, and the relation between the discourse of the colonized and the colonizer, through the ideas defended by Silviano Santiago, we can perceive the feeling of inferiority before the metropolis and the denial of the possibility of originality of the discourse of the colonized, which does not happen in Abreu's work.