This seems, at first glance, a strange characterization; the third-person narrator of Quincas Borba talks openly, repeatedly, and at considerable length about philosophy. Furthermore, that narrator tells us that he is the creator of the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Machado’s 1881 novel in which the character of Quincas Borba the philosopher first appeared. We quite naturally presume, therefore, that the narrator and Machado de Assis are one and the same. We also presume, on the basis of our experience with various forms of narration, that an omniscient third-person narrator is a reliable guide to the characters and events described in the text.

The narrator, however, is not Machado de Assis but one of the novelist’s fictional creations. The charm and serf-assurance of this chatty, irreverent, and sophisticated man-about-town both propel the narrative and guarantee its validity. The discourse and social attitudes of the narrator are very much those of the imperial elite; the philosophy the narrator expounds, while clearly a pastiche, nonetheless represents much of educated Brazilian thinking in the late nineteenth century, particularly in its justification of social and economic privilege.

Quincas Borba the philosopher first propounded the theory of Humanitism in Machado’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, but gives his friend and disciple Rubião a more detailed explanation in the first chapters of Quincas Borba. The narrator later restates the theory through a parable of his own, the story of the poor woman’s hut and the rich man’s cigar (Chapter CXVII), and clearly implies that his entire narrative demonstrates the validity of Quincas Borba’s vision. Humanitism is an exaggerated fusion of Auguste Comte’s Positivism—with its belief in the inevitability of progress and the goodness of all things—and the application of theories of natural selection to the study of human society that is generally referred to as Social Darwinism. As the narrator constructs his text, we as readers are supposed to see Humanitism validated by the success of the winners (Palha and Carlos Maria in particular) and the failure of the losers (Major Siqueira, Dona Tonica, and, of course, Rubião, the most unfit character of all). Like Rubião, we are supposed to realize, by the last chapters of the text, that the winners do indeed get—and richly deserve—the potatoes. The Positivist component of Humanitism, moreover, preaches that Rubião’s destruction, like the death of Quincas Borba’s grandmother, is natural and inevitable and that we are not supposed to feel either pity or sorrow at the outcome of the text.

Machado clearly did not accept the imported philosophies upon which Humanitism is based, but he chose to satirize their ideas rather than attack them directly. Machado, however, went beyond pastiche, using the structure of his text to demolish these rationalizations of injustice. The key here is the character of Machado’s narrator, since the validity of the text—and the validity of the philosophy that narrator insists is exemplified in his narrative—depend upon our willingness to believe him.

The narrator, first, while enormously self-confident, is also extremely self-conscious about his enterprise. He addresses us directly, eager for our full attention and understanding, and frequently comments—both directly and through what can best be described as authorly parables—on the act of writing. He discusses his own text and his decision to use numbers rather than long titles for his chapters (CXII–CXIV); he contemplates the difference between events and written descriptions of those events in Camacho’s account of Rubião’s rescue of Deolindo (LXVII); he satirizes the editors and typographers upon whom writers, alas, depend (Chapters CXI and CXIX).

Beyond this, the narrator constantly warns us, in an increasingly patronizing way, about the dangers of misreading; these warnings are issued to us directly or through exempla, such as Rubião’s misreading of the note that accompanies the strawberries. At the same time, the narrator’s discourse contains elements that appear to contradict his messages about the importance of accuracy and clarity. He does not seem able, for example, to decide who we are and how he will treat us; he addresses us as female and as male, as singular and as plural, with both grammatical formality and familiarity. His discourse jumps from detailed descriptions to self-indulgent flights of fancy, from seriousness to sarcasm. Some of his explanations of character and of events seem entirely reasonable; others strike us as odd and incomplete.

The narrator’s full betrayal of our trust occurs in the section that begins with Chapter LXIX and runs until Chapter CVI. We have already been presented with one possible adulterous relationship, that between the central female character in the text, Sofia, and Rubião. We believe, on the basis of what appears to be reasonable evidence, that Sofia is at least potentially unfaithful to her husband, but we have come to realize—if Rubião has not—that the affair is not going to take place. In this new section, the presumably omniscient narrator carefully and persuasively presents us with bits and pieces of quite plausible evidence which lead both us and Rubião to conclude that an adulterous relationship between Sofia and Carlos Maria has very probably been consummated. In Chapter CVI, however, the narrator condescendingly describes the reader as “disoriented” and a “wretch,” responsible, along with Rubião, for slandering two upstanding characters. Rubião believed because he misread and misinterpreted the unopened circular and the coachman’s tale; we are also dismissed as bad readers, since the narrator declares that the truth would have been evident, “had you read slowly.” The narrator, who has dealt a stacked deck to Rubião and to us, then gloatingly points out just how cleverly and effectively he misled us.7

As we come to realize that only one act of infidelity occurs in the text—the narrator’s betrayal of our trust—we cease to believe in the narrator and in the philosophy he is propounding. The narrator goes on to accuse us of being the sort of readers who need detailed chapter titles so that we can understand what is happening, or who claim to have read the text when we have only skimmed the titles (Chapter CXIII). Furthermore, the narrator increasingly ignores Rubião, with whom we have come to identify. We catch only an occasional glimpse of Rubião as he spirals downward to insanity and penury, the narrator, like Rubião’s faithless friends in Rio de Janeiro, is eager to move on to other, more interesting topics. Our frustration turns to shock in the final chapters of the novel; nothing in the text, we feel, has prepared us for the unexpected and miserable deaths of Rubião and Quincas Borba the dog—deaths to which the narrator insultingly suggests we may react with laughter.

Araripe Júnior was correct, then, in his perception that Machado was manipulating us, as readers, through his text; he was also correct in implying that Machado had his own philosophy—a philosophy very different from Humanitism. That philosophy, moreover, while expressed through the text of Quincas Borba, transcends the particular—the details of nineteenth-century Brazilian life and society upon which this introduction has necessarily focused. Rubião, despite some positive qualities and the affection Machado leads us to feel for him, is very much an antihero; Quincas Borba can usefully be read as an antinovel through which Machado sought to express a skepticism so absolute and universal that it approaches an antiphilosophy.

Unlike Quincas Borba the philosopher, Machado did not reject the existence of evil in the world; unlike Saint Augustine, the emblem of Quincas Borba’s final insanity, Machado did not believe that any external force—other than the pitiless and unknowable operations of blind chance—controls our lives for good or evil.