“All of this is your creation”

Autofiction in “O senhor agora vai mudar de corpo”, by Raimundo Carrero

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the autofictional character of the literary work O senhor agora vai mudar de corpo(2015), written by the Pernambuco writer Raimundo Carrero. Starting from theCerebral Vascular Accident that affected Carrero in 2010, the work narrates the difficulties of recovery, the anguish and pain before the body in its new condition as well as recalls memories of past events in the writer's life. To compose the narrative, images, symbols, metaphors, fictional elements, techniques and psychological cuts are used, which places the literary text in an ambiguous place between autobiography and fiction. In order to achieve the proposed objective, we use an interpretative methodological orientation and take as a basis theoretical references that discuss the practice of autofiction in contemporary literature, such as Doubrovsky (2014), Gasparini (2014) and Faedrich (2015). At the end of our analysis, we found that the work, by using strategies such as the use of the third person of the discourse to narrate the author's autobiographical material, expands the possibilities of the concept originally formulated by the theorist Serge Doubrovsky. Even if it does not strictly comply with the requirement of onomastic identity between author-narrator-protagonist established by the French theorist, the ambiguous pact of reading is present by other mechanisms and gives the text a hybrid character: it is an autobiographical matter, but, given its form and fictional elements, it reads like a novel.