Walks of the non-hero through the Americas: Kafka and João Gilberto Noll

Abstract

The protagonists of Kafka’s novels and a good part of his short stories are individuals lost in a strange, incom­prehensible world, as if they were foreigners looking for a way to understand and be understood by the other. A vain and infinite search, which leads them to wander through the cities, two steps away from what seems to be the (happy) destination of the journey and which soon after is out of reach, in an eternal postponement. This profile can already be seen in the author’s first novel, The disappeared or Amerika (2003), in which the young Karl Rossman, leaving Germany for the United States, begins his journey as a foreigner in a hostile country, as a kind of non-hero, figure that would come to superimpose, in contemporary times, the romantic hero and the modernist anti-hero, as in the work of João Gilberto Noll, especially in the novel O quieto animal da esquina (1991). The article departs from the idea of the non-hero as the protagonist of both Kafka’s and Noll’s work, seeking to see how the feeling of strangeness is constructed, in the mentioned novels, from the wanderings of the characters in a search guided more by instinct than by reason, undertaking both an endless journey, which in a certain way dialogues with the writing of the two authors – in these and other works –, in the open, always leaving the impression of a deliberate unfinished business.