Truth For Man Does Not Exist—But You Know What Does: Narration

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Reading Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, I came to realize two things: 1) Humanity tends not to rely on truth when truth is needed the most; 2) The true narratives that we need to hear are rendered invisible until faced with suffering, and only then is it too late.

In Lispector’s novella, she traverses the themes of introspection, poverty, womanhood, and identity, wrapping them into one convoluted intersection of marginalization and suffering. Following Macabéa’s written character through the philosophical narration of Rodrigo S.M., a perspective on the—though exaggerated for the purpose of prose—realities of poverty exist in a structure designed to do anything but serve a young woman seeking validation, hope, and any chance of survival. Here, poverty is narrated by a man cosplaying a pauper, all entirely written by a woman, that being Clarice Lispector. Crazy inception, right? Well, let’s dive further. 

The narrator deems himself unable to accurately tell this story of a young woman so abhorred by the world that he must live like her to produce her. In his production of Macabéa, S.M. depraves both himself and her of every good in the world as a means of exhausting every possibility of attaining a life where pleasure exists. At the core of the argument, suffering is exploited to tell a story—to prove a point. It is used to evoke emotion, then negate whatever feelings you may feel with the justification of ‘it must be done.’ Although I hate to spoil the ending, I must for the purposes of the argument I am attempting to make. Macabéa dies. She must die because she is a lost soul. She must die because there is nothing else to live for. Death is inevitable and so be it.

Before Macabéa’s death, Rodrigo S.M. asks: “…was every story ever written in the world a story of affliction?’

This question extends beyond literature into a broader political reality. Forced infiltration of one’s voice onto the voiceless prompts the questions of: Who gets to speak and for whom? Why do they get to speak and when? 

In politics, reactions are solely produced by narrated suffering, rather than by the people themselves who are facing affliction. Lispector treats her novel as a study of the impoverished, relegated by the perspective of man. This perspective is not just one of fiction; it also exists within the external structures. Take the wealth gap, for example. As the wealthy get wealthier, the middle to lower class populations continue to fall behind. By the third quarter of 2025, “it was estimated that the top 1% of the wealthy have obtained 55 trillion in assets, a number equivalent to the combined wealth of the bottom 90% of the United States population.” 

Despite the statistics, people are not inclined to contribute to solutions necessary to amend the blatant issue at hand. Millions of people experience economic insecurity and inequality without the support of political attention. However, the individual stories of those experiencing the likes of debt burdens, eviction, and hardship are the stories that circulate through the media, having been considered worthy of visibility, and therefore elicit a response. Such stories individualize systemic issues rather than highlighting their impact on a wide scale basis. Consequently, such systemic issues persist while appearing to be addressed. A further issue introduced is the dramatization of these stories, extracting them from their innate truth; the truth that would have been told if the invisible were actually given a voice and not solely a narrative.

In The Hour of the Star, S.M. fails to truly captivate the woman that Macabéa is supposed to be, as she never speaks for herself and is instead spoken for. The lack of distinction between her voice and his is what creates the veil of invisibility that engulfs her. Likewise, politics and the media remain speaking for those who should be able to advocate for themselves. Political institutions and the media rely on the response to narrative rather than scale, as it instills a sense of urgency in something that seems tangible instead of abstract (i.e. statistics).

There is a reliance on the use of publicized affliction as a prompter for justice and a reason to mobilize action. Those who are privileged only then come to realize that they are not supposed to be complacent with the unjust structures that we reside within. 

Suffering becomes especially political once it is mediated, narrated, and twisted to become legible to those outside of its scope. As Clarice Lispector suggests through The Hour of the Star, marginalized groups are not only defined by their afflictions but by their inability to express their stories—their truths. There is danger in the need for stories to be transformed before being acknowledged, and by that time, narration takes on the guise of truth for the purpose of publicity.

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This article was edited by Hayley Dunn.