Dom Casmurro 29.27 · 29.27

The narrator caps his aside with a maxim: 'os sonhos são muita vez confusos.' It is the reflective, generalizing habit that runs through the whole memoir — the old man pausing to convert a private detail into a small law about human experience.

The observation is true and disarmingly modest, but it also quietly excuses the very unreliability the book depends on. If dreams are confused, so, the reader may extend, is memory itself — and the entire narrative is memory. Machado lets his narrator plead the haziness of the dream while trusting him, moments later, to report waking scenes with damning sharpness. The philosophical sigh is a piece of rhetorical positioning: it lowers the stakes of his forgetting here so that the reader will not press him too hard on the reliability of his recollection when it matters most, in the chapters where jealousy hardens conjecture into certainty.

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