The article attempts to interpret the Almeida Garrett's play “Frei Luis de Souza” as a literary “reconstruction” of the legal institution of being a missing person. Garrett offers a metaphorical vision of the concept. The author transfers the compositional centre to the final part of the play, at the same time combining it with the denouement, which turns the concept or the missing person into a structure-forming element. At the same time, the life the family turns out to be a symbolic generalisation of the country's history, and special cases of a legal nature receive a general humanistic interpretation.