Dom Casmurro 4.21 · 4.21

The chapter closes by circling back to its first sentence. It ends with the very superlative José Dias uttered as he left the drawing-room — 'Um dever amarissimo!', a most bitter duty — now hung by itself as the chapter's title and final line, an exclamation stripped of its speaker and held up for inspection. After the whole anatomy of the man who 'loved superlatives', the phrase lands as pure specimen: here is the thing itself, the outsized word doing its work, dressing an act of comfortable mischief in the robes of noble suffering. Machado gives José Dias the last word and, by framing it so, lets it convict him. The portrait and its punchline are one.

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