O espaço de Sem Medo no sistema-personagem de Mayombe

In the context of post-colonial literature, we often find characters that, by being embedded in a sociopolitical dynamic still in formation, seek to reflect realities in which the definition of a new national and individual identity is urgent and necessary. These characters play a decisive role in the organization of the diegesis, being «round characters» (Forster) and also «workers» (Woloch). A privileged field of observation of the «character workshop» from this perspective is undoubtedly Pepetela’s Mayombe (1980). Each of the fifteen characters in the novel is simultaneously narrator and actor, and each one wants to affirm its own «space» in relation to the central figure upon whom the narration discourse is built: the Commander Sem Medo. On the basis of the considerations provided by the research project of University of Pisa (2017-2019), Towards a new anthropology of the literary character. Survival of modernism and realism (1945-today), this contribution aims to analyse the way Pepetela constructs the «character space» of the protagonist within the novel, creating, simultaneously, a mythical dimension for the character in the meta-romance.