NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Malignd]

<<I'm not sure I fully understand the point about Nick
Carraway's "prose style" in _The Great Gatsby_. It has
always struck me as being in keeping with his
character that he narrates in the way he does --
front, to the point, with simplicity, clarity and
sincerity.>>

Nick is a bond trader, a bond trader who writes like
this:

"We walked through a high hallway into a bright
rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by
French windows at either end. The windows were ajar
and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside
that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A
breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one
end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them
up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling --
and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a
shadow on it as wind does on the sea."

The point is that a reader isn't intended to mull or
worry this, to bring it into the novel.  Rather, he
suspends disbelief and reads on.

But Pale Fire is a book in part about writers and the
quality of their writing, and so a good reader doesn't
so readily suspend disbelief when he notices that the
mad Kinbote writes like Nabokov. 


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