ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two of Machado de Assis's early short stories, "Um Esqueleto" and "Sem Olhos". It explores the nature of Machado's reworking of Gothic devices, and argues that his recourse to those devices serve the purpose of foregrounding aspects of Brazilian society which did not fit into the country's constructed self-image as a natural haven and tropical paradise. The omniscient narrator who opens the narrative and sets the scene to a first-person narrator, whose strange and nightmarish experience as a young man will soon be shared with a small group of friends gathered for tea at the Vasconcelos's home. By containing "oral" tales of violence which refer back to the past within a rational narrative frame situated in the present, Machado coalesced heterogeneous materials into a tense unity in order to "foreground features of the social reality" that could not be accommodated in the kinds of stories that Jornal das Familias expected from its contributors.
