Frederico de Lima Silva, Hermano de França Rodrigues
Regarding the modern hero, the conflict that shapes him, from a modern perspective, lies less in his relationships with the divine and more in the interaction between individual and collective subjectivities. The urban setting, the stage for this malaise, concentrates the adversities arising from civilization's failure to fulfill its promises of equity and security. In the short story “Os nove décimos” (The nine tenths), Arturo Gouveia (1998) develops a narrative that illustrates how the contemporary hero, weakened by the failure of social welfare structures, resorts to extreme violence to achieve justice. Through an analysis based on the psychoanalytic perspective, as well as studies related to the figure of the hero, this work aims to analyze the perverse manifestation of the hero in this short story, demonstrating how this modern character navigates the tenuous boundary between heroism and villainy