The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Symbols
The Plaster
The anti-hypochondriac plaster is the invention to which Brás Cubas attributes his own death: a grand and useful idea, presented to the government as a Christian work and meant to relieve the melancholy of humanity. The motive he confesses after death is...
Pandora and the Delirium
The delirium of chapter VII is the episode in which Brás Cubas, sick, goes through twenty or thirty minutes of fever: he turns into a Chinese barber, then into the Summa Theologica, and a hippopotamus carries him to the origin of the centuries. On a snowy...
The Black Butterfly
The black butterfly is the creature that Brás Cubas kills with a towel in chapter XXXI, on the day after another, also black, came into Dona Eusébia's porch. Brás laughs at the first, kills the second out of irritation, and consoles himself with jokes: it...
The Whip
The Whip is the whip with which Prudêncio, a freedman whom Brás's father set free, lashes at Valongo the enslaved man he himself owns, and which Brás Cubas comes upon on his walk back from settling the little house. The scene closes the figure the book opens...
Humanitism
Humanitism is the doctrine of Quincas Borba, the childhood friend of Brás Cubas who reappears as a beggar and later as an heir. The name comes from Humanitas, the principle of all things, which the doctrine defines as the same man divided among all men. From...