Escritas indeterminadas e sujeitos fragmentários em contos pós-modernos de João Noll e Sam Shepard

Making sense of atypical short stories

“…It is rather a piece of literary art devoted to the fragmentation of traditional ideas of plot, character, time and space. Although the interpretation of "Nobody" is highly conjectural (RAFFA, 2007;SOBREIRA, 2010;NEUBERN, 2011), what emerges from this particular piece can be interpreted as an intriguing portrait of the human subject and the human mind as fractured, unable to exercise control over the disparate circumstances and emotions of everyday life. Although not explicitly coherent at the semantic level, this literary object presents a deeper form of coherencethat the reader may infer by emphasizing his or her "principle of interpretability" (CHAROLLES, 1983) -, one that may be implicit and even paradoxical: the text promotes a sort of cognitive mapping of the human subject's mind confronted with complex experiences in the contemporary world.…”

“…The clear majority of respondents (87%) were not able to determine who the main character is (see Table II above). The general absence of material context and the indeterminate causality obliterates the spontaneous associative processes involved in narrative comprehension, which is not totally unfamiliar to Noll's fiction (OTSUKA, 2001;BRAYNER, 2006;SOBREIRA, 2010). This is a common feature of most narrators in Noll's stories since they often attempt to inhibit the creation of a vivid and continuous representation in the reader's mind.…”