O ethos irônico de Saramago: uma leitura de Ensaio sobre a cegueira e O conto da ilha desconhecida

Abstract

José Saramago, in the article entitled The distinction between narrator and author, takes his controversial concept in the academic world in reveal that the figure of the narrator and author are coincident. For him should not exist the presence of a narrator free from its author. This fact might sound, in his view, such as lack of commitment to the work or some attempt to escape the responsibilities of author. Saramago's reflections on the authorship question refers to the fact that some authors to let their roles in support of the narrators, as if to give up their own responsibility, not only literary but also ideological. After all, with the several academic speculations about the types of narrators and points of view, the writer fears that ultimately diminish the author s thought to relegate it to a secondary role, what, for him, reveal a work without reason, therefore be ineffective. From this concept, one could say that Saramago-author is present in his narrators explicitly? Faced with the intricate problem of authorship by novelist the notion of ethos presented as compelling and consistent interface to offer an opportunity to understand the issue. Aristotelian in origin and currently used in literary analysis to understand who is speaking, the notion of ethos made us accept the views expressed by Saramago about authorship and, in his works, we could see how it manifests the presence of the narrator in text. So, were elected to form the corpus of our research two works Ensaio sobre a cegueira and O conto da ilha desconhecida. Throughout the process of analysis and reflection, both texts were revealed as areas of significant support for the study of ethos and it offered specific questions about the narrator, as well as the speaker in the texts. Before the route taken, we point a fundamental aspect of the constitution of Saramago s speech that is the ironic stroke of his arguments. The call for radical criticism of the added irony as registration discursive result in the striking features of the manifestation of the romantic ethos. Thus Saramago, a kind of creative author that is inscribed on his creature, he signed his unique presence in the characterization of the narrator and allows the verification of an ethos in his works