Dom Casmurro 21.46 · 21.46

Justina turns from the fact of the meddling to its style, and the word 'discursos' is faintly contemptuous. José Dias does not simply speak; he orates, he makes speeches, performances got up for effect. This is the same man Machado will later crystallize in the famous line that he loved superlatives.

What Justina hears as tiresome grandiloquence the reader recognizes as the agregado's whole manner: inflation, flourish, the self-important eloquence of a dependent who compensates for his position with rhetoric. By cataloguing his speeches she begins to dismantle him, exposing the machinery of persuasion as mere show. Her plainness is the perfect foil — where he performs, she reports, and the contrast lets us see how much of his influence is theatrical costume rather than conviction.

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