IN SEARCH OF LOST CHILDHOOD IN “A VOLTA DO CAMPEÃO”

Abstract

Through this analysis, in the light of Greimas semiotic theory, we demonstrate how the theme of the elderly excluded from social life appears in the narrative of Luiz Vilela. To do so, we highlight "A volta do campeão," short story in which the protagonist, a sick man of nearly sixty years, spends his days bored and uninterested about everything, until he finds a group of boys playing marbles that makes him relive the emotions lost in his childhood. Despite finding a new direction for his life, family pressures make the character give up new friends. Occurs then the resignation of Edmund, who renounces the positive values responsible for his transformation. The family home represents the space from which came oppression. Even "tired", home is the place to which the subject recognizes to go back and to stay, after all is the space delegated by society for a man of sixty. In the short story, norms and behaviors place the elderly on the margins of social relationships and the narrator's voice, once he sympathizes with the loneliness that the elderly are relegated, is dissonant on the status quo.