“Dom Casmurro” by Machado de Assis: First-person narrator says he entered his room behind himself, talked to himself, and persecuted himself

“Bento Santiago, the wildly unreliable narrator of Dom Casmurro, believes…that his wife has cheated on him with his best friend and that her child is not his. Has Capitú, his love since childhood, really been unfaithful to him?…First published in 1900…a classic of Brazilian literature…a sad and darkly comic novel about love and the corrosive power of jealousy.” —quoted from the back cover. The novel is praised in blurbs by Harold Bloom, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, and The New York Times Book Review.

Halfway through the novel, in a chapter titled “Despair,” is the following:

“I ran to my room and entered behind myself. I talked to myself, persecuted myself, threw myself on the bed, and rolled over and over with myself” (1, p. 148).

As I continue reading, I will see if there is any other description of multiple personality.

1. Machado de Assis. Dom Casmurro. Translated from the Portuguese by Helen Caldwell (1953). New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009.