Death is the starting point of the book: whoever writes has already died. Brás Cubas begins with his own death, on a Friday in August 1869, and explains that he is not an author who died but a dead man who writes: "I am not properly a dead author, but a dead author, for whom the grave was another cradle." The dedication is to the worm that first gnawed his corpse.
Being dead gives Brás a freedom the living lack. He says that "frankness is the first virtue of a dead man": alive, the opinion of others obliges silence; dead, with no audience, he can confess everything. That is why the book speaks of deaths drily, those of his father, Nhã-loló, Dona Plácida, and Quincas Borba (the exception is his mother's, which, he says, filled him "with grief and stupefaction"), and shows, beside them, what the living do with the dead: the division of the inheritance, the epitaph, the burial with few guests.
In the last chapter, Brás takes stock of his life by what he did not have and finds a small balance in death without descendants: "I had no children, I did not pass on to any creature the legacy of our misery." Death, in the book, brings neither consolation nor punishment: it is the place from which the whole life is seen without illusion.