Dom Casmurro 25.31 · 25.31

The little outburst is pure José Dias. 'Oh! a adulação!' — he repeats the word with a theatrical sigh, as though flattery were a scandal too great for measured speech. The exclamation is itself a performance, a bit of rhetorical vanity deployed against the charge of vanity.

Machado gives his most self-dramatizing character a moment of naked style here, and the reader who has watched José Dias load his sentences with superlatives sees the same instinct at work: the man cannot resist inflating even his indignation. The repetition adds nothing to the argument and everything to the theater. It is the flatterer flattering his own moral seriousness, savoring the sound of his disapproval. Behind the little aria stands the chapter's quiet joke — the one voice in the garden truly guilty of adulação is the one crying out against it.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I