Riobaldo’s apprenticeship years: the Grande Sertão

Abstract

The paper seeks to identify in Gran Sertón: Veredas of Guimarães Rosa some elements of the Bildungsroman. The narration uses a cowboy from the Brazilian deep interior as a hero who will live through his training in a band of criminals who lives in his region. The narrator concentrates in itself a series of archaic, modern, local and universal characteristics that represent the level of the voice of the report, the contradictory nature of Brazilian social life, originated in its colonial past and its present of underdeveloped nation. The main character has an ambiguous attitude with respect to the society in which he lives. When young, he rejects urban values in the name of a rural ethic that in his case includes bandit codes. When the old rescues some values of the city as the formal education but without effusive adherence to the same. The report could be seen as a particular type of learning novel that depicts a social life with profound contradictions like the Brazilian one.