Dom Casmurro 4.19 · 4.19

The conceit is spun out with mock rigor: 'a premissa antes da consequencia' — the premise before the consequence. Each phase of the walk is a stage of the syllogism, taken in its proper order, nothing hurried or out of place. The comedy lies in the sheer solemnity of the analysis, the narrator applying the apparatus of formal logic to an old man crossing a room for a backgammon board. But there is a barb inside the joke: a mind this orderly, this calculating even in its gait, is exactly the mind that could compose a denunciation and time its delivery for maximum effect.

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