ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how, by employing a digressive and deliberately difficult writing style, Saramago is able to pose such challenges. In 1998, the Portuguese author Jose Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Saramago developed a distinctive, digressive writing style in his novels and short stories, which are marked by 'a labyrinthine agglomeration of discourses belonging to different times, places and genres and whose fragmentary irruptions break up the allegedly smooth continuity of the text'. Saramago's distinctive style of writing perpetuates a sense of the author's presence throughout the text, and this is complemented by an equally recognizable narrative tone. Purportedly a parable written for children may also be viewed as an introduction for adults to Saramago's strategies of digression and his use of metanarrative as a means of prolonging or delaying the story and providing a self-reflexive complement or alternative to the plot.
