NPPF "You are telling me!"

[jbor]

Kinbote's commentary to lines 385-6

***

"garland ... briefer than a girl's"

Quoted from the last line of A.E. Housman's fine poem 'To An Athlete Dying
Young', perhaps the most well-known of all the poems in his _A Shropshire
Lad_ (1896).

http://www.research.att.com/~jrex/faves/poems/athlete.html

***

    Jane said she had tried to talk to the Shades after the tragedy,
    and later had written Sybil a long letter that was never
    acknowledged. I said, displaying a bit of the slang I had
    recently started to master: "You are telling me!"

I think the idea Kinbote was trying to get across to Jane is that he can
relate to her experience of Sybil not answering the calls or acknowledging
the letter. His use of the colloquial expression is clumsy, and he phrases
it in an awkward and inappropriately formal way, but I think the (perhaps
self-conscious) joke is that, from the example given, he hadn't "started to
master" the "slang" at all. But it's Sybil's rudeness he's emphasising.

best