Abstract
This article identifies the social-economic profile of Counselor Ayres, the character who "wrote" the diaries that became the novel Counselor Ayres' Memorial and were used as the inspiration for the story, also written by Ayres, published as Esau and Jacob. These findings show how the decision made by a second-tier officer in the imperial bureaucracy, the supposed narrator of these novels, perfectly fit Machado de Assis's objective of criticizing the lack of any meaningful social changes during the early republican era and the maintenance of a power structure very similar to that in effect during the monarchy.
Keywords:
Machado de Assis; History of Brazil; Brazilian literature