Framing Violence: Narrator and Reader in “Pai contra mãe”

Abstract

Giulia Ricco reads Machado’s famed short story, “Father versus Mother,” as a rich case study for analyzing the ways in which Machado strategically includes and excludes violence through the act of narration. This leads Ricco to reflect on how the reader collaborates with the narrator in this process. The analysis begins by examining the opening preamble, where Machado inserts the reader into the frame of the story. Ricco then moves into the plot to explore how the narrator sustains the frame of violence through irony and careful word choices. Machado’s ability to connect to the present lies precisely in the dialogues that his shortstories spark between the narrator and the modern reader when representing the forms of violence that are still intrinsic in Brazilian society.