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Ways of Remembering: Musical Reveries Over Childhood and Youth

2007; UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO; Volume: 9; Linguagem: Inglês

10.37389/abei.v9i0.3689

2595-8127

Inés Praga Terente,

Themes in Literature Analysis

In this paper we aim to analyze three different works – The Dead, The Butcher Boy and The Speckled People – and to show the capacity of music to activate memory and to act as a catalyst for nostalgia. Ballads and songs create in these works a landscape of its own, functioning both as a barrier and as a link between different characters and different worlds. An instrument or a song can become an objective correlative to the characters‘broken dreams or truncated hopes, synchronizing with their life’s rhythm, their emotional shades and accurately echoing their passions and frustrations, since the music that interweaves in the text is by no means accidental. Quite the opposite, it emanates from a carefully selected repertoire that sounds at the crucial moments and that operates as a sort of musical variation on a threefold theme: a failed love experience, a truncated sentimental journey and an intense feeling of otherness.