Faces da duplicidade em Machado de Assis e em Milton Hatoum

Abstract

The dissertation Faces of Duplicity in Machado de Assis and in Milton Hatoum establishes a dialogue between the novels Esaú and Jacó, by Machado de Assis and Two brothers, by Milton Hatoum, aiming at putting in relief the question of the double as a thematic and a structural resource of narrative construction and character composition. Both novels have as a common reference Plato s ideas about the division of oneness, presented in The banquet. In our work, we use the concept of parody, developed by Linda Hutcheon (1985), for whom the term, in the modern sense, gains breadth and designates a form of imitation characterized by ironic inversion. Subsequently, we do two synchronous approaches of the use of double; the first in Machado de Assis in the early twentieth century and the second in Hatoum, in the present day. In these synchronous moments, we detect transformations concerning the duplicity occurred in Two brothers, taking as reference the novel Esaú e Jacó and the biblical story of twin brothers -- which lends its name to Machado s novel. Proceeding to the characters analysis, questions of the fragmentation of the self, otherness and possible identity problems due to the double, are raised. We verify, in the trajectory of the characters, the transformation of the double, from one century to another, on account of a number of factors such as the relationship between time/space, which, by suffering modifications in the contemporary novel, often abolishes the linearity, reverses the causality laws, evincing the ambiguity that pervades the texts of both novels