Entre o ético e o estético: uma reflexão sobre o personagem Brás Cubas, de Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, e a personagem Sofia, de Quincas Borba

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on the strategy adopted by the narrators of the Brazilian works Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (2014) and Quincas Borba (2001), both by Machado de Assis, when they present its characters with attitudes that bring two faces that are opposed between the ethical and the aesthetic. Thus, the reflection focuses on the so-called characters Brás Cubas and Sofia. To think about it, the discussion will turn to, at first, the face of the society in which those characters lived and their contemporaries and, therefore, the virtuous attitudes worthy of admiration; at second, to the faces that represent attitudes that were not as virtuous as they appeared aesthetically. In order to contribute to this reflection, the present article will transit through the texts The Aesthetic Rationality (1991), by Jayme Paviani; Verbetes da Epistemologia do Romance (2019), volumes I and II, referring to discussions of the theory of Epistemology of the Novel; Basic Texts of Ethics: From Plato to Foucault (2007), by Danilo Marcondes, and Critique of Practical Reason (2016), by Immanuel Kant.