"Dramaticas palavras": O narrador e a teoria da linguagem em A Jangada de Pedra, de Jose Saramago

This paper analyses the narrative process presented in José Saramago's A Jangada de Pedra as another possible discovery journey offered by the structure of the novel. By means of a careful process of self-referentiality, the narrator of the story leads the audience to reflect upon certain aspects of their own act of reading, thereby problematizing the very mechanisms involved in the production and reception of narratives as a whole. The impact of this novel therefore arises not only from its metadiscourse, but also from the constant movement of approximation and separation from the illusion, which is brought on once the process of endowing the text's indeterminacies with meaning begins. On this basis, the considerations presented here are two-fold: they constitute an attempt to explore the way Saramago makes use of fiction to investigate the operations involved in the concretization and appropriation of narrative constructions and how the reader concretizes and appropriates the "theoretical" message of the novel.