Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity

Retired Dreams explores this tension. Dixon identifies the quest myth, highly displaced, as the underlying narrative model and the shaper of the narrator’s thinking. He devotes separate chapters to the function of time, to the rebirth motif, the role of matriarchy and patriarchy, the voyage motif and woman as anima, and symbols and primitivism. Particular attention is given to the role of the major tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) as devices permitting both the connection and the distancing between the tradition of heroic discourse and the domesticated, unheroic reality of the novel’ characters. Through this rhetorical-mythic lens, the book examines many of the factors that have continued to fascinate both general readers and critics – the work’s ambiguous plot and characterization its problematic ideology its self-conscious artistry and its cosmic vision.