ATDTDA (11): No detective, 314-317

[Paul Nightingale]

In which Frank is about to leave town and Dally does (317). And Frank
finally gets to tell someone (Dally) to go see someone (Kit), ie attempt to
initiate a narrative thread, which is what has been happening to him since
he came to Telluride. One might suppose that everything has been leading up
to the point when he says "you and Kit are two of a kind".

But first another disguise. Ellmore: "You'd need the right hat o' course,
and a mustache ." (314). Cf. Frank immediately post-Golden: "Over the next
year, he went through a number of disguises, including mustaches, beards,
haircuts from some of the city's finest hotel barbers, but about all that
stuck was a change of hat to something more narrow-brim ." (273).

Ellmore says he is helping Frank in the interests of the local business
economy: in terms of its effect on profit, Frank's presence is something
akin to that of a stick of dynamite? He is described here as "a
harmless-enough-lookin young fellow" (315), so there is a mismatch with his
supposed impact, which also clashes with his role as covert observer.

Frank reinvents himself as a musician with Gaston Villa's band, "enormous
face-hiding hats" juxtaposed to the look-at-me nature of their appearance
generally. To begin with, Frank ("[h]e was no detective, and had not spent
much time investigating", 274) appears inept, his efforts inconsequential,
but he keeps going, his function as a character always to interact with
others, thereby opening up the narrative for the reader: like the
anthropologist he is both present and absent. And his journey through other
characters' stories brings him eventually to Webb's ghost, mocked by other
ghosts because of his son's failings (316).

The narrative here plays with the idea that the ghost is a 'real' presence,
as opposed to a figment of the imagination: cf. the tommyknockers earlier,
and Doc T's laudanum-induced rationality (308). Frank excuses himself with a
swipe of sorts at those who would complain at the lack of characterisation;
in the context of his (one-sided?) conversation with the ghost, ie what he
says about Deuce and Lake, it sounds like a plea-bargain, what he calls
specialisation another term for the bourgeois individualism that underpins
characterisation in a realist novel. Frank has, throughout, sought meaning,
from the moment he was introduced as a child (90); for most of the in
Telluride he has been unable to achieve the kind of overarching view that
guarantees understanding. As supplied by an omniscient narrator, perhaps?

And so to Dally's departure. One thinks back to Merle's musings earlier: ".
and Dally came walking in through some doorway or other and Merle looked up
and saw this transformed young woman and knew it was only a matter of time
before she was out the chute and making life complicated for every rodeo
clown that crossed her path" (75). Given that one of the key structuring
forces of the novel is the relationship between repetition and difference .