I drain: the liquid identity in Hotel Atlântico, written by João Gilberto Noll

Abstract

With the globalization, the subject experiments the fluidity and the volatility of time, in which the numerous spheres of the current society – public life, private life as well as family and social relationship – pass through a series of transformation whose consequences fray the social tissue. In this perspective, the objective of this article is to analyze how it is the representation of the subject identity in the novel Hotel Atlântico (1989), written by João Gilberto Noll. From a bibliographic approach, the nolliana narrative is read and analyzed following Zygmunt Bauman’s ideas, which treats the passage of modernity “from the solid to the liquid stage”. Taking into consideration the ideas of this sociologist according to his liquid identities, the study gives attention to the hiker, narrator – protagonist of the novel, a subject who is “out”, to the margin, and who roams in the boarders of the pos- modernity, without longing for knowledge, material goods or reciprocal and true affections. It is emphasized that Hotel Atlântico, is in the critical and fragmented representation of the social- historical conditioning in the text and in the thematic focus as in the aesthetic options, tames the hard task of thinking the otherness when there is a collective malaise which “melts” the identity of the subject, making it impossible the statement in society and the recognition of the “other”. Likewise, the reading of this novel enables the discussion and the reflection in relation to how social experiences can be explored aesthetically by the writers and how the artistic strategies can collaborate in the representation of a determined social context.