"I've always been an exile, even in my own soul."- Fernando Pessoa stitched his philosophical fragments into one just like Frankenstein's creature - surgical pieces of a book that come to life. Pessoa's masterpiece was not built for a one genre book but it stitched together from over 25,000 loose scraps of papers found in a wooden trunk decades after his death. His raw, unfiltered, visceral, personas in different realities and illusion conveys "factless autobiography" that bonds with diary entries, introspective prose, existentialism and some fragmented souls.
His surgically fragmented soul discovered was "Bernardo Soares" who was not a character but a psychological autopsy and multilaced piece of Pessoa who completes him as a whole from 1929 to 1934. As an assistant bookkeeper, he occupies a space of profound anonymity, yet his inner world is a cycle between dream and reality that breaks through the gray fog of Lisbon. For Soares - whether he is watching the rain, drinking coffee, or looking at his boss, he breaks the moment down until it makes no sense at all. He does not record events or experience situations but the sensations of events. He is a collector of feelings rather than a participant in life. His "disquiet" comes from the fact that his mind is too sharp for the blunt reality of living which defines his trait as hyper-awareness. He is a raw introspection personified piece of a creator who can only observe and think - but never fully join into the world.
Before the 'mutilated' Bernardo Soares took his place at the bookkeeping desk, the 'skeletal' architect of the book was Vicente Guedes (1913-1916). Unlike a bookkeeper like Soares, he was a translator for a commercial firm who spent his nights staring into space and drinking his wine in total silence. He walked with a peculiar stoop and had dropping eyelids that gave him a look of permanence which reflects him as an aristocratic dreamer of indifference. He believed that the only noble senses were seeing and hearing. He famously wrote: "The only aristocracy lies in not touching. Do not get too close, that is true nobility." He didn't avoid life or living in illusion because he was brave -he avoided it because he was too sensitive to handle it.
The transition from Guedes to Soares showcases Pessoa's obsession with existentialism and phenomenology is so intense that it produces two distinct people. If Guedes is the architectural skeleton, who thinks life is a dream to be observed -then Soares is the living nervous system who represents life as a boring reality to be dissected. Soares is the raw tissue stitched onto Guedes's bones where Guedes merely observed the shadow of the world and wanted to turn his life into a statue while Soares feels the weight of its every heartbeat as a pile of fragments and proving that the deepest 'disquiet' is found not in the palace of dreams - but in the heart of the ordinary.
The masterpiece reveals the skeletal structure of literature but a visceral rejection of the traditional novel. Pessoa mirrors a chaotic archive of loose sheets that avoids chronological order in favor of emotional intensity. By blending the intimacy of a journal with the weight of an existential manifesto. This 'Factless Autobiography' functions as a gallery of moods- one page may offer a sensational dissection of the Lisbon fog while the next explores the crushing weight of a Tuesday afternoon. By refusing a cohesive narrative, Pessoa showcases the reader to experience the same disorientation he felt through using personas (Guedes and Soares) - a fragmented self lived in pieces that was held together only by the ink on the page and sitting in a quiet room because his real self is too "disquieted" to handle.
"My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddle strings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony." This confession by Pessoa acts as the ultimate bridge between the author and the reader. The 'factless autobiography' of Bernardo Soares becomes the universal diary of the modern soul. Remind us that our existence is not merely a physical act but a complex and an internal theater of our mind. Pessoa's unfinished manuscripts and heteronyms defined us as a pile of anatomical fragmented truths and a breathing orchestra of conflicting desires. We are all perpetual exiles who are wearing different masks for different people, acting out a script of multiple personas while our true self remains hidden in the 'disquiet' mind. In the end, it proves that we may walk alone through the world but we are never alone in our heads-we are a crowd of ourselves. The only way to be 'whole' is to embrace the many versions of who we are, forever playing a symphony that has no end.
The writer is a student (2nd semester of 1st year), English Department, Southeast University
