THE UNUSUAL FACE OF DEATH IN THE TALE "BOA NOITE, MARIA" BY LYGIA FAGUNDES TELLES

Abstract

This paper is a fragment of the research entitled "The double as manifestation of the unusual in Lygia Fagundes Telles"™s fiction: a study of the works A noite escura e mais eu and Invenção e memória" (PIBIC/CNPq) developed at the Universidade do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte. The focal point of this work is the short story "Boa noite, Maria", belonging to A noite escura e mais eu (1995), highlighting aspects of death as a manifestation of the unusual. To achieve that, we based our research on the Freudian propositions about the strange, Todorov"™s, Cortázar"™s and Calvino"™s studies about the fantastic, and on what Bravo and other authors have conceived about the double. Through the reading of the tale the purpose is to observe the plot"™s configuration and the construction of the main character, a rich, lonely sixty-year-old woman, who lives for about a year with a stranger in whom she recognizes attributes of a friend, whose role in narrative is to placate the lady"™s lonely nights and, finally, to practice euthanasia, ridding her of a vegetative aging. In this short story, the unusual prospect of death takes contours of imagination, dream and delusion, so much that it is practically impossible to determine the logic of things, among which are the real existence
of such friend and even of death.