ipl-logo

The Hour Of The Star Character Analysis

750 Words3 Pages

Narration and Gender in The Hour of the Star When author Clarice Lispector in a 1977 interview is asked what her last novel 'The Hour of the Star ' is about, she answers that it is "the story of a girl who was so poor that all she ate was hot dogs. That’s not the story, though. The story is about a crushed innocence, an anonymous misery." However, the plot is not just the story of a victim with the intent to raise awareness of poverty, but the discussion of the narration of a victim. In the novel, Lispector has created a second narrator named Rodrigo S.M., a character that raises the readers’ consciousness around how we constantly perceive and portray, act and react. As stated on the first page, "Thinking is an act. Feeling is a fact." Everything we feel has an impact on how we see the world, and as an artist the aim is to create emotions by the perceiver, whether it 's a reader, an audience member, a viewer, and so on. This could be done in several ways, such as aesthetically or by using political statements. The Hour of the Star is a piece of literature that incorporates both of these in a way where it does not feel intrusive or as Lispector is dictating what the reader should think. This humility in storytelling is not explicit in the majority of novels, however The Hour of the Star draws attention to it through Rodrigo 's …show more content…

The extent to which Rodrigo influences the story, overpowers the actual story of Macabéa, the main character. Not only is Rodrigo financially better off than the girl, he also holds several other privileges that she does not have. Through his presence, Lispector deconstructs and undermines the assumptions and apparent idea of her story, a highly political tale of poverty and lack of development in North-Eastern Brazil and how the migration to escape this affects the urban

Open Document