The Third Bank of the River by Guimaraes Rosa

One day, quite unexpectedly, the narrator’s father orders a canoe made. His wife thinks it absurd for a man his age to think about hunting and fishing, but the man offers no explanation. When the canoe, sturdy and built to last, finally arrives, the man solemnly paddles it into the middle of the river. During the first few days after this strange withdrawal, the narrator worries about his father and regularly leaves some food along the riverbank for his father’s sustenance. The days become weeks, months, years, and it finally becomes clear that his father will never return to his family. His father manages somehow to ride out the floodwaters every year, though he barely touches the food left for him by his son and by other members of his family. The daughter marries and has a son, and the family gathers by the river in the hope that the man will come to see his new grandson, but he does not appear.

The daughter moves away, and finally the mother goes away to live with her sister. Finally, only the narrator, out of some profound sense of duty, stays. When he realizes how aged he has become, he knows that his father must be very old, and he goes down to the bank at last and calls out that his father’s duty is finished, that he, the narrator, will take his place in the canoe. The father approaches in the canoe, but the son panics and flees. His father is never seen again. Finally, the son longs for a place to die, a canoe.

The father stands for the way of life of the region, the original culture and his seemingly absurd action of floating on the river has been interpreted as an attempt to bind his family to the region. However it is only his eldest son, the narrator, who remains behind. Other family members move away. The story is set in the sertao or back lands, the drought prone region which witnessed large scale migration to Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. Read this analysis by Ravnkilde :

" Like the majority of Rosa's stories, `The Third Bank of the River' is set in the backlands, sertao, of the state of Minas Gerais. It is a poor area, known for both drought and extreme rainstorms. In such a region two ways of living are long established; the migratory and the sedentary. The latter involves a high degree of dependency on the weather, the land, and on the individuals comprising the family structure. This interdependency is what is encountered in The Third Bank of the River. The sedentary family structure is so all-encompassing that the members are no longer individuals. They cannot exist outside the family, as can be observed in the complete lack of personal names in the text. Characters are referred to solely as `mother', `father', and `son'—the names of the positions they occupy within this system. Without it, they are nameless. When the father leaves, the family gradually falls apart. In the shape of the father's absence, the migratory nature of life in the back lands begins to assert itself against the sedentary.

In leaving the family, Father comes to represent an archetypal father who will (always) one day disappear, and yet always be present in the psychological significance of his absence. The relationship between the father and the son is the meeting between these two traditional ways of living in The Third Bank of the River. The tradition of becoming what your father is, which is strong in this region, is linked to the settlers, but conflicts with the lure of migratory life and it is between these two possibilities, that the son is stretched in existential angst. On the one hand family is all-important to him; on the other he feels the call of movement.

Importantly, though, Father is not going away, he stays close to the home and thus makes the psychological anguish of the leaving father figure ironically clear. `Our father never came back. He hadn't gone anywhere'. He is close by but not there. This contradiction leads to the question of whether the father is leaving in order to anchor the family to its home-instead of bringing the family to the city, he hovers around them, forcing them to stay. To leave the poor rural areas to go to the city is an act of survival undertaken all over the world at the expense of local tradition. One could interpret the actions of the father as resistance to what he might see as a betrayal of the region and its traditions, as a fight to make his own family stay to repeat and retell the life of the region. However Rosa is no mere regionalist and there is more at stake here."