The Meditator and the Observer: Rubem Braga’s and Fernando Sabino’s Narrators in Two Chronicles

Abstract

This article develops a comparative study of two chronicles, one penned by Rubem Braga (“Quem sabe Deus está ouvindo”), the other by Fernando Sabino (“Anjo brasileiro”). The main goal here is to understand the differences among the narrators. One should notice that they each have a distinctive attitude towards the story. Braga’s narrator, in the first person, gets involved in the plot, which gets somewhat overshadowed by the digressions that are present in the chronicle. On the other hand, Sabino’s narrator sets a distance between him and the story he’s telling, using dialogue for exposition and character building. In order to develop an analysis of those differences, this study is based on the concepts of “showing and telling”, as exposed in “The Art of Fiction”, by David Lodge. It is also based on the works of Davi Arrigucci Jr., regarding Braga. The article attempts to synthesize the different attitudes of the narrators with two images: that of the meditator-narrator, in Braga, and that of the observer-narrator, in Sabino. Then, the article tracks the importance of the narrator’s centrality in the literature specialized on chronicles, particularly in another Arrigucci Jr.’s text, to argue in favor of a multiplicity of creative strategies for the chronicle.