"O imortal" e a verossimilhança

Abstract

When “O imortal” was published, in 1882, Machado de Assis was still interested in parody and pastiche as literary genres. From 1880 on, he started to make use of fictional writers who produced works which were either unrealistic or not to be trusted. With them, Machado transforms the social substance of his time, questioning and destroying the type of representation based on the presupposition that the signs, concepts and structures of reality have to coexist in a harmonic relationship. The text demonstrates that the denaturalization of habitual ways of reading has direct consequences for the mechanism of verisimilitude, the theme of “0 imortal”