José Saramago's The Tale of The Unknown Island and the voyage simbology

Abstract

The “travel”, as a literary genre or a motif of inspiration, is a constant in the Portuguese culture, presenting an obsessive expression in the literature diachrony. We here analyse one of the several literary examples of this reiterated presence: “O conto da ilha desconhecida” (“The tale of the unknown island”), by José Saramago. In this Saramago’s tale, the theme of “travel” opens space for various reflections upon the journeys between the conscious and the unconscious, the real and the abstract, the external openness to the world and the internal self-knowledge process, and also to the ironic criticism of the narrator’s comments, often imbued with Marxist sociological connotations. The semiotic analysis of this tale does not exclude the intellective conceptions and our personal reading, exploring the symbolic charge of the travel as an initiation journey of the central figure of the narrative: the man of the boat wanting to set course to the island.