O Cadáver, um emblema da morte em “Ápeiron”, de Caio Fernando Abreu

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to investigate the procedures used by Caio Fernando Abreu to construct the representations of death in his work. For this, I take, here, the short-story “Apeiron”, published in the book Inventário do irremediável (1970). In this text, the reflection about death as well as the dissociation process connected to it is triggered by the representation of the mental states of a corpse, a kind of allegorical emblem of the human finitude, since this can be seen as the personification of death. Moreover, the emblematic nature of the dead body also refers to the emptiness of the human life. The short-story establishes an ambiguity, especially because the discursive choice (indirect and free indirect discourse) does not allow the reader to relate the ideas presented in the text directly s to the corpse-protagonist or to the narrator, leading him to question if the text is the product of the narrator’s imagination or the unusual maintenance of the dead man’s mental life. Whether the text can be seen as the imagination about death or experience of death, “Apeiron” shows, through the death process,  that Abreu  reflects  on  the sense of the existence.