“George”: the wandering to liberty

Abstract

This work proposes a brief analysis of the short story “George”, by the Portuguese contemporary writer Maria Judite de Carvalho. This text is inserted in the last book published by the author in life: Seta despedida (1995). We intend to focus on an issue that seems important in this story: the identity, which appears here fragmented, decentered, a true “mobile celebration”, as stated by Stuart Hall, when addressed to the identity of the postmodern subject. From this central theme others emerge, equally important to the analysis and understanding of the story: the dissolution of crystallized positions assigned to genres (George, ambiguous word, apparently male, is the name of the female character who leads the story), the trajectory of the character, which symbolizes the society of the simulacrum and is characterized by the constant drift and endless escape of an individual who wanders around the world and inside herself.