An analysis of the narrator’s relationship with Macabea and what this says about the relationship between the author, characters, and the process of creation.
This paper shows how `The Hour of the Star` is an extreme novel, not because it has descriptions or representations that could be considered shockingly excessive or violent, but because it encounters issues and problems, which simply cannot be resolved, such as the role of class and gender in the artistic creation. Moreover, it explains how `The Hour of the Star` is an anti-novel that shows the limitations of the realist novel because much of the novel is about the process of writing and the relationship between the narrator and the story he creates.
`In ‘The Hour of the Star’, the question of perspective is of great importance because Clarice Lispector, the author, creates a man, a writer, who himself engages in the writing of a story and creates yet another character, a young woman from Northeast. The ontological speculations of the narrator who is self presented as the author and the utilization of a self-conscious narrator who is himself involved in the writing of a book contributes to give this work its peculiar structure, which is open to diverse interpretations. There are several layers of meaning, because the story is about a poor and underdeveloped girl, a fictional author who struggles to tell her story, Lispector’s questionings about fictional representation or as the critic Fitz argues, a story about how the middle class views the poor. The narrator’s misogynistic point of view shows the difficulty to write for the other, the story of Macabea is also about how the middle class views the poor, and thus, Macabea is a symbol for the underdeveloped Brazil. Finally, an important aspect of the novel is the fact that Macabea is an anti-heroine and The Hour of the Star is an anti-novel because it fells outside the reaflist conventions.`