The Book of Disquiet

Bernardo Soares is the main character and first-person narrator of The Book of Disquiet. He is author Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym, one of many literary personas Pessoa “endow[ed] with their own biographies, physiques, personalities, political views, religious attitudes and literary pursuits” (viii), according to translator Richard Zenith’s introduction to the 2003 Penguin Books edition. Pessoa uses Soares’s character to explore aspects of his own identity and experience via fiction. This formal and narrative choice enacts Pessoa’s notions regarding the amorphous nature of identity; Pessoa and Soares are both the writers of The Book of Disquiet. The novel can be equally deemed “a novel or an essay collection or even a kind of pre-internet codex blog” (“‘The Book of Disquiet’ Is the Weirdest Autobiography Ever.” Electric Literature). The narrative does not overtly distinguish between Soares’s and Pessoa’s identities: Soares’s selfhood is fabricated from his meandering dreams and imaginings, as Soares himself is a dream constructed by Pessoa. In his introduction, Zenith quotes Pessoa as having called Soares “a semi-heteronym […] because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it” (xi). This is to say that Soares is less distinct from Pessoa than many of Pessoa’s other heteronyms.