Abstract
This work develops a reading of The "Fortune Teller", by Machado de Assis, based on the hypothesis that the Machadian short story, along with the reader, devises a vertigo effect, disturbing destabilization in the reading process, cut with deceptive linearity that is connected to the structure of the narrative. Passage operators with paradoxical effects are what is implied in life and in fiction: the work of Machadian irony, obliquity, and style.
"The Fortune Teller"; vertigo effect; Moebius; irony