The Third Bank of the River :: Third Bank River Essays

The ternion Bank of the RiverBeginning shortly beforehand the turn of the last century, there was a noticeable trend towards the perplexing in modern Brazilian literature. Writers such as Machado de Assis and Jorge Amado have twain explored the use of the unstated and the forced agree between extremes that have grown to be so crucial to the modernist movement. No Brazilian author, however, has mastered the compromise quite like Joo Guimares Rosa, a man who was erstwhile described as not only leading, but preceding the commentator to a place where there is discord and cacophony under which there is a strange harmonythe third bank of the riverthe land either soul craves for. In his collection of short stories, Primeiras Estrias (1962), Rosa pays particularly fast attention to ambiguity as a main theme in Brazilian backland writing. offset printing translated to English in 1968 under the title First Stories, Primeiras Estrias, and in particular, The Third Bank of the River , is in many routes the defining work of the Brazilian short story.Carl Jung once said the confrontation of the two sets of opposites generates a tension charged with energy and creates a living, third thing.1 In The Third Bank of the River, Joo Guimares Rosa does bonny that by first exploring these separate, symbolic opposites in the lives of members of the narrators family. He then crafts, out of the conflict, a third position which can be, at best, described as a compromise between the two extremes. oftentimes times, these extremes are the very definitions of characterization we come to expect in a short story, and, by blurring these lines, Rosa is able to also blur The Third Bank of the River into a work of ambiguous and allegorical nature. By never exactly defining the third essence that is created, the author is able to explore this clearly important topic in greater depth. The importance of the product is that, in every case the author presents, it represents the journe y from one position to its opposite, continuing until the characters reach their final destination the third, intermediate situation. It is in this way that fathers crossing has a profound effect on the family (most notably the narrator) and the way they conduct the rest of their lives.The important thing to tell immediately about The Third Bank of the River is that it can either be read as a literal retelling of the events or as a metaphor concerning the death of a loved one.