Suggestions & Digressions

[Terrance]

>From Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (my copy is the
Second Edition) University of Chicago, 1961, 1983. 

Booth is discussing narrative "Norms" and the "applied
author."

Nabokov may here (Laughter in the Dark (NY, 1938), p.1.
"Once upon a time...welcome.")
have purged his narrator's voice of all commitments save
one, but that one is all-powerful: he believes in the ironic
interest--and as it later turns out, the poignancy--of a
man's fated self-destruction. Maintaining the same detached
tone, this author may intrude whenever he pleases without
violating our conviction that he is as objective as it is
humanly possible to be. Describing the villain, he can call
him both a "dangerous man" and a "very fine artist indeed"
without reducing our confidence in his open-mindedness. But
he is not neutral toward all values, and he does not pretend
to be.
RF.77