A Escrava Isaura 10.36 · 10.36

Álvaro's answer is truer than he knows: 'essa ainda não chegou, e nem eu mesmo sei qual será' — the climax has not come, and I do not even know what it will be. He speaks as a lover uncertain how his courtship will end; the reader hears the words as the novel commenting on itself. The real peripeteia — the discovery of who 'Elvira' is, the collision of Álvaro's love with Leôncio's pursuit — is indeed still ahead, and no character can foresee it. Guimarães lets his hero confess his own blindness to the plot he is inside, a small dramatic irony that binds the ballroom's idle storytelling to the grave story the reader is being told.

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