The narrator’s supernatural place in Baltasar and Blimunda, by José Saramago

Abstract

The act of narrating is a very old social practice, present in countless societies. From the origins of oral narrative to the emergence of the novel genre, even reaching narratives in semiotic systems beyond the linguistic system, it is seen that the act of narrating has undergone mutations and diversified. The mutation of the narrative also altered the figure of the narrator, and established the figure of the author with the advent of the literary novel. Some narrators of modern and contemporary novels present themselves as real challenges for traditional studies of narratology, which aim at watertight categorizations and typologies. Therefore, the objective of this essay is to describe some peculiarities of the figure of the narrator in Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), by José Saramago, reinforcing the difficulty that a nomenclature has in delimiting the saramaguian narrator. The hypothesis raised is that the narrator of Baltasar and Blimunda is a kind of omniscient character narrator, not involved in the narrative plot, but an eyewitness of it. The omniscience often demonstrated by the narrator, and the textual marks that place him within the narrated universe, give this narrator some supernatural enthusiasm. The reflections proposed here point out how the variety of linguistic resources used by the narrator reinforce his supernatural character.