Death's memories and the (trans)formation of it's identity in Saramago's novel

Abstract

We are constituted by pasts, heaps of situations and events that integrate, interact and exclude themselves, contributing to a formation of "what we are" trhough the time, through actions that have a finitude, a death. Thus, according to Candau (2011), the game wich exists in memory, resulting in the construction of identity and composed of memories and oblivion. It is, therefore, in this memory-identity-death triad that this article studies, in order to, from the cultural and socially constructed memories of death, of "past", we aim to demonstrate how this contributes to the construction and personification of the main character of the José Saramago’s novel (2005), Death with interruptions - death itself. To this end, we propose, initially, to remeber and discuss the concepts of memory and identity and their interrelationship from Candau (2011), Hall (2006) and Bauman (2005), as well as the preconception about death built in the human imagination - a caricature of a skeleton wrapped in his scythe -, guided by the studies of Elias (2001), Ariès (2011) and Simmel (1998). Then we attach to the character death and the formation / transformation of his identity in the saramaguian novel in search of its essential self. We conclude the research and consider death
composed by a reformulated sense, as essential to life and the source of life despite its paradox.