Abstract
In the early 1880s, Machado de Assis' fiction operates a mixture between the world of the living and the underworld, whether through the presence of a deceased narrator and author or through the creation of once-dead characters. Such procedures have been understood as: a link to the Menippean tradition of the dialogue of the dead; a form of affront to the reader; the unfolding of the self into analytical self-consciousness; the mockery of the theories and ideas of the time such as spiritism, among other interpretative and analytical points of view. In this paper, it is proposed that the unusual encounter between a judge in the Empire's Rio de Janeiro and the beautiful Greek man, killed in 404 BC, can be read as a rhetorical procedure that creates a parody of the discourses accepted as plausible in that society in which the tale was published. At the same time, the narrative itself, the letter describing an unusual encounter, unites the pragmatics of a judge with the seemingly inexplicable, which uses the fantastic mode for the solution of an intricate problem: the presence of a dead body in a dressing room.
Keywords:
Machado de Assis; fantastic's rhetoric; verisimilitude; fantastic mode; homossexuality