A melancolia de Riobaldo e do fidalgo de La Mancha: uma leitura comparada entre Grande Sertão e D. Quixote

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyse how the melancholy is represented in which is considered by significant part of the scholars as the first novel of the modern age – D. Quixote, and how it is represented in Grande Sertão: veredas, which is considered by part of your critics as a novel from a time when the romance gender is deconstructing itself. In D. Quixote, the protagonist’s melancholy results, above all, from his frustration with the reality. The novel brings in itself the emergence of the modernity, which imposes as a disturbing scenario and, as consequence, his protagonist crazily searches an escape from the reality, from his impoverished situation - both economic and existencial - to a world of greatness and noble values: the idealized world of the chivalry romances, where he tries to rescue the fantasy of the chivalry romances and to adopt behaviors common to “walking knights”. His frustration with the reality leads him to succumb to melancholy. In Grande Sertão: veredas there is also the expression of a melancholic frustration, but the protagonist’s motivation is the search for fixed meanings which allow him to control himself and the world. Riobaldo frustrates himself before of the disordination from a world where everything is mutable and the meanings escape from him. While Don Quixote breaks with the tradition of the chivalry romances, demonstrating that in the Modern Age there isn’t place anymore to his fantasies of greatness and noble values, and adopting a representation considered more realist, insofar exposes the ridiculous and anachronism of the behavior from the “knight of the sad figure”; in Grande Sertão: veredas the own realist representation is questioned, because there is no more hope of realist ordination of the world, once that: “this world is very blended…” (ROSA, 2011, p. 237). So, having in view that, on the one hand, Riobaldo stucks himself to the nostalgia for the search of meaning, it’s possible to affirm that, be by the nostalgia that searches a way out in the fantasy, be by the anguish in the lack of meaning, the subjective expressions from both the characters reveal us different forms of manifestation of the melancholy and point affinities with the modern time which they sign up.