This article identifies some of the tensions and ambiguities present in the narrative of João Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas. It analyses the protagonist Riobaldo Tatarana's process of insertion into the world of the hinterland hired bullies, inquiring into how the character embodies some of the crucial dilemmas of a republican political culture constitution in Brazil, especially as for the contradictions of the role of school in the Brazilian civic community formation of memoir and traditions. Moreover, this article postulate that the character Riobaldo Tatarana embodies into the narrative one of the most conflits in the constitution of a Brazilian republican political culture during the twentieth century, that of the relationships between culture of letters and the illiteracy.
Political culture; Brazilian republicanism; illiteracy.