Quotes | Quincas Borba | Clavis Libri

Chapters I to XII: Humanitas and the Philosopher's Death

everything, from the slippers to the sky, everything falls under the same sense of ownership

Speaker: the narrator
Characters: Rubião, Cristiano Palha
Themes: Money and Wealth
Devices: Repetition, Irony

Explanation and analysis

The novel opens in the middle of the story: Rubião, in his dressing gown, at the window of the house in Botafogo, looks at the bay and compares the professor of a year ago with the capitalist of now. Only afterward does the book go back to Barbacena to tell how he came to be there. The phrase the narrator chooses to summarize this gaze is a list running from the smallest to the vastest: the slippers from Tunis, the house, the garden, the bay, the hills, the sky. Everything fits in the same "sense of ownership."

The effect is comic and revealing. Rubião does not admire the landscape, he possesses it: the sky enters the account just as the slippers do. Those, by the way, were a gift from Cristiano Palha, the recent friend who will soon guide him through the purchases and the life of the Court, and one may note that the detail already mixes, on the first page, Rubião's wealth with the hand of the one who gives him things. Soon after, he concludes that God writes straight with crooked lines, because the death of his sister and that of his friend, which seemed misfortunes, ended up in an inheritance. The conclusion suggests a man who measures other people's lives by what they yield him.

The phrase may be read as the key to the book's theme of money: fortune does not change what Rubião is, it changes the way he sees the world, and the Botafogo window is the first picture of that change. The narrator does not condemn him aloud. He lets the list do the work, and this unobtrusive irony accompanies the book to the end.

To the vanquished, hatred or compassion; to the victor, the potatoes

Speaker: Quincas Borba (the philosopher)
Characters: Quincas Borba (the philosopher), Rubião
Themes: Money and Wealth
Symbols: Humanitas, The potatoes
Devices: Parallelism, Antithesis, Leitmotiv

Explanation and analysis

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