The narrative architecture in Dom Casmurro: sly narrators and doubles or the split of the plot

Abstract

This paper, written on the occasion of Machado de Assis’s hundredth death anniversary, aims at reappraising Dom Casmurro. This novel has aroused passion in its various readers throughout time. Such passion has brought forward heated debates, trials and a rich critical fortune which counts, among others, with the already classic interpretations of Raymundo Faoro, Roberto Schwarz, Helen Caldwell and John Gledson, as well as with more recent contributions, such as the ones by Marta de Senna, Letícia Malard and Fábio Figueiredo Camargo. Bearing this in mind, we intend to shed some light on the aspect that has seduced so many scholars: the ambiguity fostered by the narrative architecture which, disguised as reminiscence, at fi rst shows a deliberately slow pace while, in its second part, turns much brisker. Such an arbitrary procedure, one of many, points out to the split of the narrative – and of its subject-narrator – who, pretending to be narrating Bentinho and Capitu’s story, narrates, in fact, his transformation into Dom Casmurro. Within this framework, the house on Matacavalos Street serves as an analogy of the (re)construction/elaboration of both the narrator’s memory and narrative.