The Cave (novel)
The Centre (Original title: A Caverna ) is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago from the year 2000.
Content
A 64 -year-old potter, Cipriano Algor, who lives in a small village with his daughter Marta, regularly supplied the center, a monumental residential and commercial complex in which his son Marcal works as a security guard, with its pottery. Suddenly, the business relationship is terminated because pottery on the market no longer be fashionable and therefore unsaleable, and Algor must even take back all unsold pottery.
He is now trying through the production of folk clay figures to come again into the business. He has time and again with different hierarchical levels of the center, which is a symbol of totalitarianism and alienation of people from their roots in the novel deal. The production of the large number of characters in the novel takes a large space, the description of the action is often accompanied with allegorical comparisons.
The apparent idyll is threatened by a procession of father and daughter to the son-in to the center, which then takes place. Inflection point is a treasure in a cave under the center. Is found no more and no less than the arrangement of the cave allegory of Plato. In the long- dead people who are known to have never seen the real world, but only illusions during his lifetime, the protagonists recognize. This causes them to leave the center and then also the village and pottery - with an unknown but hopefully the expected target. You can - as in Plato - the captivity behind and step outside.
More than any other novel of Nobel laureate Saramago is the novel peppered with allusions to myths humanity and world literature. The preparation of the clay figures (from " clay " ) is a biblical creation. The home-coming potters recognizes Odysseus as his first dog. Waiting for him as to that woman. The lives of the four protagonists ( five with the dog, six with the child that will be born soon ) is linked in many ways in secret with the central metaphors and events which are apparent only gradually (as in Plato's allegory of the cave ). The six clay figures correspond to the six main characters and also the six manacled dead, seated in the archaeological site under the center. The potter has already once had a key experience in his oven as he sat just like the Platonic people on a bench in front of the wall. Perhaps the book also addresses the struggle of the individual against the dictatorship of Salazar.
The distinctive feature of the novel is not interrupted by sections fluency of narrative, reflection and a lot of direct speech that is seamlessly integrated into the ceaseless course of the sentences. This voice and reflection river a functioning family is the element that carries them through the inhumanity of the system of the "center ". The sixth person, the new wife of the center comes at the end of the family because they are " talking " long before that it was. Communication, understanding, love, faith and human creativity ultimately prove to ferment a non-alienated future beyond the "center". Also is discussed towards the end when it is stated analogously that the flow of events further carries us incessantly, and it may also happen that he suddenly flows with us in our direction, that he has turned without us realizing it. This happens when suddenly in the Plato cave under the " center " be reflected substance and truth materialize.