Dom Casmurro 5.49 · 5.49

Here the aged narrator openly marks the limit of his own memory. 'Disseram-me, não me lembra' — it was told to me, I have no recollection. The enormous grief of the previous clause is retroactively stamped as hearsay, and the impersonal 'não me lembra' (it does not remember itself to me) makes forgetting sound like something that happens to him rather than a failure he owns.

This is the whole method of Dom Casmurro condensed into a breath. The book is a memoir written to 'tie together the two ends of life,' and it keeps confessing the gaps in the rope. If Bento cannot even remember José Dias's mourning at his father's death, how much can we trust his later certainty about Capitú and Escobar? The narrator's candour about small forgettings is the ground on which the reader learns to doubt his large convictions.

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