The Soul and the Self: The Internal Struggle of the Heteronyms in Fernando Pessoa

<p>Fernando Pessoa wrote his poetry under various<br>identities known as Heteronyms and the prominent<br>heteronyms of Pessoa, Alvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro<br>and Bernardo Soares have represented in their writings a<br>sense of longing and a feeling of entrapment and a sense of<br>incompleteness. They all lack something and that lack<br>becomes the inherent theme in their poetry. The differences<br>between the Soul and the Self become very prominent in the<br>sphere of heteronym, where the self becomes possessed by a<br>variety of souls with their longing and expectations out of life.<br>Such representations of Heteronymic writings in literature<br>are rare and have never happened on such a vast scale as it<br>has happened in Pessoa. The various interpretations given to<br>the soul in both philosophical and psychological dimensions<br>are read into to give an insight into the heteronyms and their<br>clash with the Self. The writings of heteronyms are not just<br>fancy or imaginations of the self but also the representations<br>of their collective consciousness. This paper proposes to look<br>into the crisis felt by the heteronymous author by analyzing<br>works of various heteronyms and of Pessoa. </p>