Barren Lives by Graciliano Ramos

First published:Vidas Sêcas, 1938 (English translation, 1965)

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: Northeastern Brazil

Principal Characters:

• Fabiano, a poor herdsman
• Vitória, his wife
• The older boy, never named
• The younger boy, likewise anonymous
• The dog, also nameless

The Novel

Barren Lives is an episodic novel divided into thirteen chapters, each with its own title. Set in the northeast of Brazil, the novel follows the lives of Fabiano and his family as they struggle for survival in a region known for its drought cycle, with periods of severe drought killing cattle and making agriculture impossible, eventually followed by torrential rains and life-threatening floods. Though the novel is told by a third-person-omniscient narrator, the point of view shifts from character to character.

The story opens with Fabiano, Vitória, the two boys, their dog, and their parrot on the road during the drought season, in search of a new home. Exhausted, thirsty, and starving, with no food in sight, Vitória kills the family bird out of necessity. As an occasional cloud begins to appear in the sky—signaling possible rain—they come upon a deserted ranch house. Fabiano contracts work with the landowner, herding his cattle. The landowner pays him in cattle and goats, but since Fabiano raises no feed, he must sell his earnings to his boss at bargain prices. He is thus never able to get ahead and is always in debt to the landowner. He goes to the market in town to stock up on staples such as flour and salt. He wanders from store to store, certain that he will be cheated by the town folk, who understand sums better than he does. When a policeman invites him to a game of cards, he accepts, primarily because the policeman is a figure of authority. Both he and the policeman lose all their money at cards. The policeman then provokes Fabiano, who finally responds by insulting the man’s mother. Fabiano quickly finds himself in jail for the night, though he has committed no crime, and his fear of authority is again confirmed. He later runs into the same policeman in the country; he nearly kills him, but his respect for authority prevents him from acting.

The younger boy admires his father greatly. Watching Fabiano break a horse, dressed in the typical leather clothing of the herdsman—chaps, chest protector, jacket, and hat with a chin strap—he decides to imitate him. Unfortunately, the goat he chooses to tame is uncooperative, and the boy lands on his stomach in the dirt with his shirt torn.

The older boy overhears a neighbor mention the word “hell,” and he asks his mother what it means. Vitória, like the rest of the family, is illiterate and inarticulate; in frustration at her inability to answer her son’s question, she slaps him in the head.

The entire family goes to town for their yearly attendance at church. Fabiano and the boys have new suits; Vitória has a new dress. The boys walk comfortably in sandals, while Fabiano and Vitória struggle in their town shoes, finally taking off their fancy shoes and stockings until they come to the edge of town, where they bathe their feet and again put on their shoes. Fabiano’s fear of townspeople returns. He considers them evil cheaters who look down upon country folk like him. He makes the same mistake he made the last time he was in town: He buys a drink of rum. The rum makes him bold, and he considers gambling again, but Vitória casts a disapproving glance. He refrains from gambling but treats himself to another shot of rum, more than he can handle. The dog becomes ill. She is thin, with patchy hair and sores on her mouth. Though she has been a loyal member of the family, Fabiano decides he must kill her in order to protect the children. While Vitória huddles in their dark bedroom with the two boys, trying to cover their ears, Fabiano gets his gun and tries to kill the dog. He misses, hitting her in the hindquarters. She drags her bleeding body along, trying to reach her favorite tree. She dies dreaming of happy times with the family and plentiful food.

The drought comes again, and the family abandons the ranch to search for survival. This time, they plan to leave the northeast and look for a new way of life, perhaps even in the city.

The Characters

The characters in Barren Lives are individuals who also portray typical types of the backlands in which the novel takes place. The adults have no surname and the children have no given names, suggesting their function as archetypes. Like the backlanders they represent, Ramos’s characters are uneducated and illiterate, superstitious and fearful, and barely capable of using language to express themselves. Yet Ramos creates sympathetic characters through his use of shifting perspective. Vitória, the younger boy, the older boy, and even the dog each seem to tell the story from their own perspectives in the chapters that bear their names. Fabiano likewise narrates the “Fabiano” chapter, but his point of view dominates four other chapters and is represented in three others. Such use of point of view reveals the inner thoughts and feelings of each character, even though that character is unable to articulate those thoughts and feelings to the other characters.

Fabiano is a typical backlander herdsman, at once the lord of his family and the victim of the landowners for whom he works, simultaneously highly skilled at his job and frightened by his superiors. He plods through life with little imagination. What small dreams he does have are beyond his reach.

Vitória is the smart one in the family, able to figure sums by using seeds of different kinds and sizes. Her one dream is to have a real bed, a bed made of leather stretched across a frame, instead of the bed of tree branches on which she and Fabiano sleep. Such a bed represents a luxury beyond the means of a couple whose children play naked and whose belongings must be easily portable in the event of a drought. More creative than Fabiano, she imagines a new and different life, and she sets her family on a new course, toward the city, away from the destructive and inevitable drought cycle that controls their lives.

The older boy longs to understand more than his parents can explain. He communicates best with the dog, each of them communicating by gesture and sound rather than language.

The younger boy unsuccessfully attempts to imitate his father’s actions. Like his father and his brother, he is most comfortable in the company of animals.

The dog, though nameless in the English translation, is named Bailee in the original Portuguese. She is as much a member of the family as the two unnamed boys. The chapter told from her point of view is the one in which Fabiano tries to kill her, wounding her instead. In the most emotional chapter of the novel, she passes through the stages of fright, pain, paralysis, and finally death.

Critical Context

Barren Lives was Graciliano Ramos’s fourth and last full-length work of fiction. Later works were principally autobiographical, though he did publish some children’s stories. Unlike his other novels, which are narrated in the first person, this novel has an omniscient third-person narrator; however, the clever shifting of point of view nearly erases the presence of the narrator.

Like all Ramos’s novels, Barren Lives originated as a short story. Ramos first told the story of the death of an unusually intelligent female dog, then added pieces about her owners. When asked by his publisher for a new work of fiction, he added some chapters to the pieces already published separately, which may account for the episodic structure of the narrative. With the exception of the first and last chapters, the individual chapters seem much like self-contained short stories; the order could be changed without damage to the work itself, yet together they form a unity of vision. Nevertheless, the novel has sometimes been criticized for its episodic nature.

Ramos portrays elementary characters such as Fabiano and his family by revealing their psychology and simplifying textual language to approach the linguistic level of his characters. Even the dog is an empathetic character.

Ramos was an exemplary regionalist writer, locating all of his works in northeastern Brazil. Indeed, the landscape is a constant, if harsh, presence in Barren Lives, often in contrast to the corruption of town life. Ramos remains one of the most important authors of the modernist period in Brazil, and Barren Lives remains essential reading for students of South American literature.

Bibliography

De Oliveira, Celso Lemos. Understanding Graciliano Ramos. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Provides an overview of the author’s life and work and a bibliography. Chapter 5 examines Barren Lives.

Dimmick, Ralph Edward. “Introduction.” In Barren Lives, by Graciliano Ramos; translated by Ralph E. Dimmick. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965. A general introduction to the author, along with an analysis of the novel.

Ellison, Fred. Brazil’s New Novel: Four Northeastern Masters. Reprint. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. An introduction to the novel of the Northeast and four of its principal authors. Chapter 4 is dedicated to Ramos.

Martins, Wilson. The Modernist Idea, translated by Jack E. Tomlins. New York: New York University Press, 1970. An overview of Brazilian modernism, with a chapter on Ramos as one of modernism’s exemplary authors.

Mazzara, Richard A. Graciliano Ramos. New York: Twayne, 1974. An excellent introduction to Ramos and his work, with a chronology and a bibliography. Barren Lives is discussed in several of the thematically arranged chapters.

Willem, Linda M. “Narrative Voice, Point of View, and Characterization in Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas Sêcas.” Mester 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 18-26. A thorough discussion of Ramos’s use of a narrative strategy that seems to present the novel through the thoughts of illiterate, nearly inarticulate characters.