Dom Casmurro 4.11 · 4.11

'Immobilisava-lhe o pescoço' — it held his neck rigid: the steel-stiffened stock fixed José Dias's head as if mounted on a pedestal, and the image completes the 'monumental' motif from the chapter's opening. The man who gives ideas a monumental cast is himself set up like a monument, neck locked, bearing statuesque. The narrator's deadpan coda, 'era então moda' — it was the fashion at the time — pins the whole picture to a vanished decade and pardons the vanity as period style, even as the description has quietly turned José Dias into a stiff, propped-up effigy of himself.

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