A modern city comprises several cities within itself. A metropolis, due to its own geography, maybe doesn t admit any totalizing narrative, which can t bear a complex plurality. It is a great challenge to contemporary literature to describe the city amidst its plurality of voices. One possible answer for the question of how a city could be represented in literature is the fragment, which allows the apprehension of a part of that totality. A fragment is a part of an entirety that gives signification to a city as a whole, which in itself is totally fragmented. So the fragment is one feasible way for literature to represent a metropolis torn in pieces due to its own geographical expansion and heaps of different narratives that saturate every modern city. As a possibility to express the city as a whole, and also to comprise its so many narratives, literature will work with ruin, which is a possibility of giving meaning to what has fall short of meaning and is, in itself, the annihilation of existence. Ruin here is to be understood as the impossibility to signify what is, in itself, transitory, ephemeral, it is the difficulty of expressing the every day life of a transitory city, which is always moving, always beginning and ending, as the beginning and ending of a day. To deal with these matters, the urban chaos is studied through the Babel myth, through an expression of the torn city within the Brazilian modern movies, and in the novel Eles eram muitos cavalos [They were a lot of horses], written by Luiz Ruffato; all of these narratives that focus on violence, fear and loneliness within the contemporary cities.