ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the Pessoan oeuvre, however, is not to view Livro do Desassossego as part of the heteronymic project as such, but rather to examine the textual structuring of Bernardo Soares's outward-looking gaze upon the world. It aims to examine aspects of Bernardo Soares's Livro do Desassossego in the context of the wider return to questions of subjectivity in early-twentieth-century European thought and literary creation, through a comparison of this work with Miguel de Unamuno's La novela de Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez. Unamuno's novella is a throw-back to the tradition of the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century and thus, from its most obvious formal aspects, it is a clear rejection of the simulated objectivity and distance adopted by its nineteenth-century successors. Where Unamuno's novella is carefully structured, Livro is a work with no fixed form, with no fixed order, and without even an undisputed corpus.
