Dom Casmurro 8.11 · 8.11

The maxim is set off in guillemets as a borrowed truth, and it names the governing metaphor of the whole chapter — indeed of Bento's habit of mind. 'A vida é uma opera' will be elaborated, in the pages just ahead, into a small cosmogony in which God writes the libretto and the Devil the music.

By attributing the idea to another, an old tenor, Bento gives himself room to half-believe and half-smile at it. This is his signature posture: advancing a grand, fatalistic view of existence while leaving a door open to irony. The reader should keep the aphorism in mind, because a man who thinks life is an opera composed by others is a man well prepared to believe his own tragedy was scored in advance, and to absolve himself accordingly.

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