Uma sombra do passado: figurações do monstro gótico em Tolkien

Abstract

The Gothic presented dark and monstrous antagonists that confront the concept of good and evil, as occurs with Gollum, in Tolkien's literature. This research is a narrative analysis that has the guiding problem: “which elements of the Gothic are present in the figuration of Gollum”. As a methodological path, we opted for the concept of figuration, proposed by Reis (2018), which considers the story of the character beyond the resources of the narrative surface. It was noticed in the figure of Gollum, from the descriptions of appearance and environment, the character's speech and his story, symbolic elements of the Gothic, such as images of venomous and viscous animals, gloomy environments that bring shadows from the past and the own dual position in the plot, now antagonistic, now companion. Thus, like the Gothic monster, Gollum opens up to individualistic and wild human nature, oscillating between good and evil.