In his essay entitled Mirror Sta~ge as Formative of the Function of the I (Ecrits, 1-7), Jacques Lacan observes that infants pass through a prelinguistic stage of development in which they recognize their own image in mirrors and proceed to identify and assume a self-image before actually entering into meaningful contact with the Other (individual persons, society in general, language as communication, etc.), with its consequent broad social conditioning and determination. The interplay between the Ideal-I created in infancy and the world around it interests us in the context of the present study insofar as it constitutes the nuclear subject of three key Brazilian short stories published over the span of nearly a century and reflecting three distinct approaches to individual identity within the social matrix; in each case, the use of mirrors provides the fictional vehicle for the exploration of the relationship, and in a broader sense the function of the mirror may be seen to reflect the respective social worldview of the three writers in question. Our glance into the literary looking glass leads us to contemplate two giants of prose fiction in Brazil--Machado de Assis (18391908) and Joio Guimaries Rosa (19081967)-and a living short story writer, Luiz Vilela (born 1943). Our three-generational study will focus specifically and graphically upon a triad of stories whose titles immediately reveal the subject of our contemplation. These stories are 0 espelho by Machado de Assis, the tale of the same name by Guimaries and Imagem by Luiz Vilela. Machado's story was published as part of his Pap is avulsos collection in 1882, while Guimaries Rosa's appeared exactly eighty years later in Primeiras estdrias (1962); Vilela's tale was published in his Tremor de terra collection the year of Guimardes Rosa's death (1967). Brief comments regarding the first two of these stories have been made by Leo Pollmann in his 1973 festschrift paper entitled 'O espelho': Zur Erzihlkunst von Machado de Assis und Guimardes Rosa, while nothing has bee written to date concerning the third selection; Pollmann feels that the mirror stories by Machado de Assis and Guimardes Rosa have very little in common beyond the incidental fact of involving mirror use, while the present study will attempt to show Guimardes Rosa's subversion or reversal of all that Machado was about and how Luiz Vilela in turn laborates upon the dichotomy already set up by the previous writers. In Machado de Assis's O espelho, the first-person narrator of the anecdote set within the omniscient third-person story proposes to give his hearers an esboqo de uma nova teoria da alma humana. Each of us, according to this theory, possesses an alma interior and an alma exterior, the latter of which is made up of those persons, things, values and processes in the outer world (Lacan's Other) which together influence and are important to the alma interior with which the individual is born: