ABSTRACT
Nuno Bragança’s novel A Noite e o Riso [The Night and the Laughter], published in 1969, focuses on the hero’s growth and formation, as well as his young adulthood, as a man and as a writer. In this process, the protagonist is confronted with various boundaries of various types that he must cross.
This crossing of frontiers configures itself as a transgression and operates the concept of “transgres-sivity” while promoting a trialectical view of Being, tributary of Existentialism and aligned with the latest theories on the study of space.
This paper intends to show how the movement of the character through various and varied spaces, including the forbidden ones, contributes to the discovery/construction of his Self and identity, which leads him to the choice of one side of the crossed frontiers and develops the consciousness of the urgent need to find his own right way of life and pushes him for a revolution that may changes the society and directs it to Modernity.
This (self-)awareness determines the protagonist’s action in this novel and will have a more efficient continuity in the later ones, whose protagonists, like the author himself, are committed to the fulfilment of this revolution.
In short, the author and his characters’ goals are “to change the life” (Rimbaud) and “to change the world” (Marx).
