The Year of The Death of Ricardo Reis - Themes

Themes

The novel addresses several powerful literary themes, but most of them indirectly. For instance, Reis reads of the events leading to the Spanish Civil War, and he sees floods of Spanish immigrants arrive in Lisbon seeking refuge, but he himself never expresses strong feelings or even a cogent understanding of the meaning of the conflict.

Reis also carries on a lackluster love affair, but even in what seem to be his most intimate relationships, he is continually and voluntarily alienated from society. The most revealing glimpse of Reis is in a series of conversations with the spirit of Fernando Pessoa, over the course of which Reis loses a clear concept of the nature of life and death and the difference between the two.

In the novel's final scene, Reis "dies" by calmly putting on his jacket and following Pessoa to the graveyard. Ultimately, it is a story of one man's attempt to resist any sort of cultural contextualization and reject any place in society whatsoever.

This book is also, in some sense, an exercise in meta-literature. Fernando Pessoa created the character of Ricardo Reis fifty years or more before this novel was written, giving him a biography and writing many poems in that name. That Saramago would place the two characters side by side suggests a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between fantasy and reality, a theme common in Saramago's work, and a rejection of traditional limitations on narrative practices. Interestingly, Reis spends much of his time reading a novel called The God of the Labyrinth, a fictional novel mentioned by Jorge Luis Borges and attributed to the title character of his short story "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain".