In the early nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, as Franco Moretti observes, the narrative typically establishes a clear distinction between ‘illusion’ and ‘reality,’ with the former occupying the level of story and the latter occupying the level of discourse. We see this quite plainly in Stendhal, where the protagonist's ignorance and immaturity are the subject of frequent narratorial asides; but the distinction is even more pronounced in Balzac, where the aphoristic quality of the discourse serves to distance it from the very substance of the story it is telling.2 In Balzac, as Moretti argues, the maturity that constitutes the ultimate generic objective of the Bildungsroman, the enlightened realism that we expect our hero to achieve, has shifted from the world of the story to that of the discourse. Maturity, he writes, ‘refuses to mingle with life and direct it: those maxims that in Wilhelm Meister [1795–96] imparted wisdom to the dialogue among characters, in Balzac are found only in the disembodied world of the narrator's discourse.’ No longer the ‘crowning of growth, nor “wisdom” generated directly from the story, Balzacian maturity is founded on a rupture: on its estrangement from the narrative universe’ (Way 140–41). In the novel I shall be discussing in this chapter, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ Dom Casmurro (1899), it is possible to identify a similar conflict between illusion and reality, only in this case the dynamic is inverted – the underlying story or ‘narrative universe’ being associated with reality, while the discourse, so astute and judicious in Balzac, here assumes a delusional or illusory quality. What we are offered, in other words, is a reverse Bildungsroman, in which the discourse consistently misrecognizes the reality of the story it is narrating and, in so doing, serves as a linguistic correlative for broader social disjunctures and ideological incongruities.