As marcas do estigma: uma análise dialógica do conto “Linda, uma história horrível”, de Caio Fernando Abreu

Abstract

This study aims to perform an analysis on the relationships between the stigmatized characters present in the short story "Linda, a horrible story" (1988/2018), by Caio Fernando Abreu from a reading script proposed for High School. The author has great prominence in literature not only for his scanty writing, but also for his ability to make visible, in his work, characters marginalized by society, as well as to construct them capable of rumbling and confusing both society and the subjects who are willing to make these characters deviant from what is full and socially accepted. To this end, characters, discourses, and conflicts are evidenced in order to point out how stigmatizing marks arise in society, as well as deteriorate the identity of those who are affected by them. We take as theoretical background the studies on dialogism and the concepts of discourse and social voices by Mikhail Bakhtin (2010; 2011; 2016), as well as the concept of stigma addressed by Erving Goffman (1963/2017) in order to enable an analysis of the short story from the proposal of a reading script for high School. Methodologically, our study has a bibliographical character with a qualitative approach and a descriptive-interpretive nature, based on the dialogical method. From this, we analytically investigate how the dialogues between the characters in the story characterize them as deteriorated beings, and how the ideological discourses, present in this interaction, interfere during this process the process of stigmatization of the characters in the work. The results show that the way the characters are constructed and characterized inclines towards hostilized stereotypes and kept inside a cage, under the containment of deteriorated identities, projecting renegade bodies and voices silenced by social stigmas. Therefore, the research points to a reading containing narrator and characters transgressors of social conventions in search of freedom, provoking in the reader a social restlessness in face of the (in)completeness of the analyzed work.