Pastiche
This novel exists within a method of art called "pastiche" where small vignettes and essays are combined or braided together in a way that is less about plot per say, and more about emotional progress. The jumbled quality of the story's occasional randomness gives the book a kind of melancholic feel, especially when the prose considers age, death, and the meaning of one person's experience of reality. In those moments, the randomness is obviously a consequence of a mind so full of emotional knowledge that it pours our a stream of consciousness.
The allegory of age
As an allegory, the book provides an adequate comment on the aging process. There are many aspects of this motif present in the novel because, as many aging people are aware, the process of aging is strictly unignorable. The pain and complication of age in the body make daily life a meditation of focus and continual effort. The aging process is documented in this book by the aging memoirist himself who is strikingly lucid, but also sometimes disconnected in his associations—at least to the reader sometimes the connections are not precisely clear. The story accentuates the privacy and personal nature of one's later years of life.
The King Lear analysis
As a dying man, Pessoa has the authority to provide his official comment on the artwork of the earth, and he starts from the top. He says that King Lear is critically defective but still admirable as art. He loves the creative spirit above all else and praises the classical tradition of the West, mentioning as far back as Greek and Roman poets. His point of view is that humans are capable of unimaginable artistic prowess, but often the craftsmanship covers inherent weaknesses within the art for a kind of moral integrity. At least, that's what suggests about Shakespeare who is a fairly good representation for Western art.
The imagination crisis
As a writer, critic, poet, and accidental philosopher, Pessoa describes his experience of mind as a kind of horror. He says that although his practice of memoir seems narcissistic and self-congratulating, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that it is actually a harrowing process of honesty and brutal examination. The thoroughness of self-skepticism this late in life is competing with a life time of opinions and experiences, but the coming of death means a new kind of standard for his mind. He struggles in vain to capture the essence of his existence in language, and the process feels to him a kind of martyrdom.
Memoir as a process
The author is aware of his memoir as an artwork while he is writing it, which (side note here) is interesting because the author never published this reflective work of "factless autobiography." In fact, it was published posthumously, which means that the book's commentary on memoir and correctly capturing the essence of one's human life was to Pessoa only an act of spiritual examination and artistic practice. He never published it, so the memoir cannot be said to have a personal audience; rather, it was like an open letter to the universe in response to the opportunity that life presented.
