The affective and identity crisis of the psychiatric doctor in Memory of Elephant, by António Lobo Antunes

Abstract

A full day description of a “psychiatric” character from the novel Memory of Elephant, by António Lobo Antunes, is made by his memories amid the current events. The degrading and depressive life, which establishes itself after his stay in Africa as a doctor, will be the mark of this individual adrift, who, fragmented, does not restore his lost identity. In a crisis, he lives the drama of his divorce from his wife and the distance of his daughters, and searches for, in the small actions of daily life, the evasions for his helplessness. Without social and personal interaction, he lives the lonely disenchantment of the frustration of an insignificant reality, added to a depressive level that keeps him inert in his decisions. The anguish, the loving suffering, and the deep identity crisis permeate the narrative and become the sensibility and dignity of this man fluid, marks of a writing curved to the post-modernity optics, in which the author challenges the public to decode the voices that sound in this discourse, representing its communicative accuracy. António Lobo Antunes provides, in the first novel of his life, a psychological and almost autobiographical writing, when numerous fictional information is confused with the reality experienced by the author. Maria Alzira Seixo, Ana Paula Arnaut, Stuart Hall, Zygmunt Bauman, and other theorists will be used to promote discussions about the writing and the crisis of the subject in his time and location. The Pierrot of a postmodern world still is imprisoned to the past, a time that will not be recovered, unless by the memories of what could have been and was not.