Atdtda [4]: A familiar story, 125-126

[Paul Nightingale]

The "extra member of the Inconvenience's crew" might well be the narrator,
who has to be, somehow, 'there' to record their adventures.

In the opening paragraph a careful distinction is made between "the true
face" and "one he recognised": if truth just 'is', then that which is
recognised is dependent on reading, a 'going back to' and 'making sense of'
(similarly, below, "turquoise" or "Blue Ivory", and then "a miniature copy
..., rocks piled in roughly the shape of a human", 126). Note that the Chums
are returned to the youthful enthusiasm they demonstrated at the outset,
approaching Chicago: Darby's exclamation allows us to recognise his first
(identified by name) speech on 3, and on each occasion the verb used is
"cried". Similarly, the Chums' enthusiasm as tourists ("barg[ing] ashore,
eager to spend their pay on anything at all") allows us to recognise their
arrival in Chicago. To do so is to suppress, or gloss over, any knowledge of
more recent scenes.

The Chums are not identified in the dialogue that begins at the bottom of
the page and continues over. The text has it that "each of the boys was to
gaze at the enigmatic miniature he had purchased ... and try to glimpse ...
some expression of truth beyond the secular" (127).

The miniatures, of course, represent/stand in for landmarks that allow one
("the stranger") to "recognise" the terrain, possibly by 'going back to' the
version provided by a map. When told that "landmarks are either too few or
too many to keep straight", an unidentified Chum says it "[s]ounds like my
average day", ie one that does not stand out from the crowd. In the same
way, this passage refuses to identify the Chums by name when they speak.
When this textual strategy was used on the opening page, one could speculate
about the nature of the utterance, the speaker's relation to
authority/hedonism; but here the speakers are all consumers, with no
distinguishing features that allow us to "recognise" them. We don't even
know if all "the boys [have] barged ashore".