Brás Cubas is the narrator and protagonist of the novel. He was born in Rio de Janeiro on October 20, 1805, into a family that grew rich and then invented a noble origin for itself; he took his law degree at Coimbra, was a deputy without reaching minister, and had a married woman as a lover. He died in 1869, at sixty-four, unmarried, and tells everything after death, as a "dead author".
The life he narrates is one of projects that do not come to completion: a plaster against melancholy, a candidacy that another takes from him, a seat in parliament that he loses, a newspaper that dies within months. As a boy, he confesses to having come out "opinionated, selfish, and somewhat contemptuous of men". As an adult, he protests against those who call him cynical: "I am not a cynic, I was a man".
What makes him an unforgettable character is the voice. Brás interrupts the story to talk with the reader, corrects what he has written before, announces that he will suppress a chapter that remains written, and goes so far as to say that "the greatest defect of this book is you, reader". Being dead, he says what a living man would keep silent, and each confession comes with a theory that explains it. The reader is left between admiring the lucidity and noticing that the theory usually arrives in time to be convenient; the text sustains both readings.