What do Alameda’s characters want?

Abstract

Alameda (1963), by Astrid Cabral, is a book composed of twenty stories, in which the protagonists cause a certain strangeness to the public (a grain of beans; the land of a square; a wooden fence; etc.). Storytellers, when in the first person, belong to the plant world. Their sensations, desires and experiences are reported to us from their own voices. And when in third person, they often position themselves at the same level as the characters, in some cases resorting to the free indirect style, as seen in the tale “A orquídea de exposição”, for example. In this type of construction, there is a process of approximation between the human and the vegetal, presenting narrators with points of view that can be considered as hybrids, as they transit between the two worlds. Taking into account the character’s particularities, this study tried to promote an approximation/distancing between the characters and what is considered as human. This process causes a guiding question: What do the Alameda characters want? To be able to answer it, I turned to the concept of Existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre, highlighting two narrative elements: time and space.