Abstract

The Brazilian, Clarice Lispector , narrated with a unique and alarming style that touched passionately profound aesthetic and ethical universal themes approached through quotidian events of the second half of our restless twentieth century. Lispector's last novel, The Hour of the Star, describes the last months of an poor, uneducated, and sickly young woman, Macabea, who had immigrated from the drought raged Northeast to Rio de Janeiro. The story is told by an omnipresent narrator who informs us he has invented the whole story of the woman, and who states that this woman is Everywoman/man in the face of death, and the face of the absurdity of life. Lispector narrates into her novel not only self-conscious allusion to the narrator, Macabea, herself, and the readers, but also to the narration itself, which is constructed as a defiantly aesthetic act of life. ;The objective of this dissertation is to examine the heteroglossic word of Lispector, described by the author with Heideggerian irony as her basic building block and her intractable obstacle in life, and the polyphony of interdependent plots, characters, and philosophical themes. Of many thinkers with whom Lispector shares intertextuality I have featured Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Bakhtin. Thus this study begins with the phenomenon of epiphany and participation in the interdependent web of all life. Following is the analysis of Lispector's short story, "The Fifth Story," which demonstrates the Kierkegaardian fear and trembling we must endure even in quotidian surroundings to maintain faith that life is worth living. Language motivating the themes in Lispector's lyrical prose is studied through her unique stylistic devices. The contemporary tragedy of the protagonist, Macabea, is viewed through Nietzsche's perspective of Greek tragedy with interplay between the basic human Dionysian and Apollinian aesthetic impulses. Lispector's aesthetics imply immense moral responsibility, which can neither be rule bound nor relativistic