Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto (1881-1922) was not only a suburban, courageous, ironic and combative writer, but also a Black man who was ostracized and misunderstood by many of his contemporaries. He experienced the critics' contempt and his family's indifference towards his vocation as a literary man. Restless in pain and harsh with hypocrites, he had to face madness, alcoholism and racial bias. The article reports the relationships between the madness of his father, João Henriques, and Major Quaresma, the protagonist of Lima Barreto's novel Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma. The novel is a mélange involving fantasy and reality, literature and confession. It involves a domestic fact mentioned by his biographer: his father's mental alienation and the family's tragic condition brought about by long and endless neurasthenic crises. Themes are foregrounded by the aesthetics of existence through which life is analyzed as a work of art.
Lima Barreto; Policarpo Quaresma; madness