Drawing from the short story The Priest or the Metaphysics of Style, by Machado de Assis, this dissertation proposes to follow a theoretical trajectory of concepts and styles of writing, investigating to what extent one, using this as another base of epistemology that s unorthodox, is absorbed by another. Such that we observe how the concepts in question operate in the work of Roland Barthes as counterpoint to some conceptual formulations of contemporaries in this school of thought. Meanwhile, Barthesian thought has as its principal tenet to reinvigorate the Machado de Assis preoccupation with the act of writing; the preoccupation is present, folded into the writing, in his stories – there is a fictional space where he can explore the eternal debate between a novelist and philosopher. Following these fundamental references to the literary craft, in the end, a critical discussion occurs on the practice of writing, from which some contemporary writers were spawned: thus they began recreating tales of the Carioca author.