"The secret cause", secret causes: some nuances in Machado de Assis's irony

Abstract

This reappraisal of “The secret cause”, which is a very well known short story by Machado de Assis, published in the volume Several Stories, in 1896, attempts to explore how the author, in an apparently serious short story, builds up a narrative permeated by irony, understood here not in its most restricted sense, as a fi gure of inversion, but as a means for the textual construction to lead not only to a refl ection about the nature and function of literature, but also to the critical focus on the contemporary society at the moment the text was produced and on the human condition as well.