The several “Pedros” who inhabit the cities: violence, everyday life and urban experience in Rubens Figueiredo’s Contos de Pedro e Passageiro do fim do dia

Abstract

Pedro is the name of characters in several works of Brazilian Literature, such as Capitães de Areia, by Jorge Amado, andLira Paulistana, by Mário de Andrade. What they have in common is that these Pedros originate from the poor working class. The teacher, translator and writer Rubens Figueiredo also committed part of his fictional works to the portrayal of the everyday life of the victims of injustice and social exclusion, especially in urban areas and their outskirts. Thus, the aim of this article is to examine the ways in which violence, be it physical or deriving from social inequality, is represented in Contos de Pedro, from 2006, andPassageiro do fim do dia, published in 2010. Critics and scholarssuch as Beatriz Resende and Karl Erik Schollhammer see a heterogeneity in contemporary Brazilian Literature and, amongst its diverse characteristics, the urgency in relating to the historic reality can be noticed in the short stories and novel analyzed here, given the need Rubens Figueiredo shows when approaching the social and urban reality. Whether it be from Pedro’sPassageiro do fim do diaperspective or from the omniscient views ofContos de Pedro’s narrator, we are before young and adults, women and men whose social exclusion can be perceived by means of themes such as loneliness, education and school, violence and disillusionment. It is through everyday life and the precarious jobs of the Pedros in the short stories or from the perspective experienced by Pedro in the novel that the author, just as Chico Buarque did in the song Pedro Pedreiro, reports the oppression of the Brazilian working class.