Abstract
This article aims at performing a close reading of the novella "The Alienist", from his book Papéis avulsos (Loose Papers, 1882), and focuses on the relationship between the narrator and his chosen subject matter in an attempt to understand the various perspectives that he assumes throughout the text. The narrator’s oscillation, or the way that Machado de Assis incorporates this oscillation into the novella is something quite revealing about the way the author had to reconsider his concepts of literature and of the Brazilian social process in this first book of short stories of his literary maturity.
Narrator; Literature and society; Machado de Assis; Brazilian literature