The problem of the character: identities and the being-in-the-world in A river called time, by Mia Couto

Abstract

general goal pursued by this work is toinvestigatethe images of mankind and their ways of narrating themselves as a remedy to the insatiable thirst for identities, whose theme is, in the literary field, a privileged matter for the novelistic genre. The paper consists of a reading proposal of this contemporary novel from character building strategies. The fictional figure is focused here as a phenomenon, which conditioned by the inherent temporality in the narrative setting process, highlights the constitutive nature of the self, allowing the reader to formulate pictures of the man in his full exercise of being. The post-colonial novel of African Literature, A river called time (2002), by Mia Couto, is analyzed from a thematic crossing of character, identity and memory. In this narrative, due to historical, social and cultural conditions, there is an incidence of themes that question, today, more keenly than in other literary fields, the formulation of identities.