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

The Third aver of the RiverBeginning ill-judgedly before the number of the last century, there was a noticeable trend towards the ambiguous in modern Brazilian literature. Writers such as Machado de Assis and Jorge Amado have both explored the riding habit of the unstated and the forced compromise between extremes that have grown to be so crucial to the modernist movement. No Brazilian author, however, has mastered the compromise instead like Joo Guimares Rosa, a man who was once exposit as not only leading, but preceding the watcher to a place where there is discord and cacophony under which there is a strange harmonythe third bank of the riverthe land every somebody craves for. In his collection of short stories, Primeiras Estrias (1962), Rosa pays particularly close maintenance to ambiguity as a main theme in Brazilian backland writing. First translated to English in 1968 under the title First Stories, Primeiras Estrias, and in particular, The Third Bank of the River, is i n many ways the defining represent of the Brazilian short story.Carl Jung once said the confrontation of the two positions 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 just that by first exploring these separate, symbolic opposites in the lives of members of the narrators family. He whence crafts, out of the conflict, a third position which can be, at best, exposit as a compromise between the two extremes. Often times, these extremes be 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 incisively defining the third essence that is created, the author is able to explore this distinctly important topic in greater depth. The importance of the crossing is that, in every case the author presents, it represents the jour ney from one position to its opposite, keep until the characters reach their final destination the third, intermediate situation. It is in this way that fetchs 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 recognize without delay 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.