Writing and survival in Letters from prison (Frei Betto)

The search for a narrative. A story behind a set of apparently disconnected stories. A bundle of records that not only refers to the symbolic description of an important Brazilian historical period, but also, despite its incipient literary charge, to the trajectory that a man must necessarily trace in his crossing over the absurdity of the world, the movement of dynamic balance of the author's origin in the denial of death. Roland Barthes' concept of the Neutral provided the attribute of impasse as a critical methodology and, as a result, the right to new subjective perceptions, access to surprising answers and, above all, the "scintillating" aesthetic-creative experience in the analysis of the letters, to apply an expression of Barthes himself. The lucidity that ties Sisyphus to his destiny under the immense stone of his condemnation or Albert Camus to his human revolt for the condemnation of the species is of the same order of that which links Betto to literature, representing his only real possibility of conquering true freedom: through conscience.