# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 05: Blind Contour

id: narrator_publicist | owner: claude | tier: risk
chapter: `output/chapters/chapter_05.md` | raw draft consulted: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_05.round_01.md`
characters audited: June Park (protagonist, focalizer), Theo Brennan (favored), Odile Marchetti (mentor, prose visibly defers to her), Mara Valdez (warmth-favored)

## Narrator-stance check (step 4)

READING_GUIDE §1–2 declares close third past, dual POV, with the interiority discipline "Feelings are rendered through action, object, and dialogue first" and no declared unreliable or publicist-by-design narrator. There is therefore **no design exemption**: any unattributed admiration is a finding. The guide does license free-indirect perception in June's register ("a painter's eye — she names pigments, edges, kinds of light"), which is the attribution channel tested below. June's voice card establishes her judgment as fallible by design ("mistakes being understood for being pitied"; "wants to be seen exactly and wants no one to catch her needing it"), and this chapter dramatizes that fallibility on the page — relevant to every attribution ruling.

## Marker sweep — what was checked, strongest counter-candidate per marker

**Marker 1 (mystique assertions).** Strongest counter-candidate: "Odile had materialized at her shoulder" (line 63). Strip test: "Odile was at her shoulder. She looked at the page for the length of time it deserved" — full action residue. The surprise-verb is motivated in scene: June has just spent ninety seconds under orders not to look anywhere but at Theo; anyone arriving at her shoulder arrives unseen. No claim that Odile is unreadable or beyond comprehension; her next act is a four-word diagnosis. Pass. Also checked Ruth's blade-sharpening (line 35), which the text explicitly de-mystifies: "unbothered, ordinary: a tool made ready." No marker-1 hits.

**Marker 2 (effect-on-others framing).** Strongest counter-candidate: "She stood at the front pair of easels until the room ordered itself. It took under a minute and embarrassed everyone slightly" (line 37). This is not the field-guide failure shape ("the kind that made people reconsider their life choices") — the reaction is the actual class in the actual scene, time-stamped ("under a minute"), produced by a specific shown action (standing silent, then tapping the card). Where Odile's authority lands on an individual, the text gives a specific named reaction: "Theo's shoulders came down half an inch. The diagram loosened into a man on a stool" (line 71). Pass.

**Marker 3 (cosmic-flattery figuration).** Strongest counter-candidate is the flagged risk line:

`EARNED — "he had converted all of that into posture and was now offering her the most legible torso on the eastern seaboard" (line 49) — the on-page action that backs it: "he sat the way a man sits for a passport photo, square to her, shoulders level, forearms resting on his thighs, glasses straight." Strip test residue: the full posture inventory plus its cause ("There were no labels to fix up here and no keys to produce"). Attributable perceiver: June — named in the same sentence ("It was, June recognized, his version of helping").`

Three further things keep this earned rather than publicity. First, the superlative's content is "legible" — drawable, a craft measurement in June's register — not mysterious/dangerous/special. Second, the comic hyperbole is June's voice-card idiom (jokes, visual nouns), not narrator certification. Third, and decisively, the chapter rules the admired quality a **failure** twenty lines later: Odile — "You are performing stillness. It is not the same as sitting. Sit" (line 69) — and the diagram is precisely what licenses June's catalog-stranger first drawing ("the concept of a man," line 59). The admired thing is dramatized as the obstacle. The universe owes Theo nothing here; he owes Odile a better sit.

**Marker 4 (gesture inflation).** Three candidates examined:

- "His mouth sat unevenly, the left corner lower, set a fraction tight, the mouth of a man making himself easy to draw and finding it harder than he had budgeted for" (line 83). The interiority read is an inference from acts already on the page: he squared himself into a diagram (49), announced "I can do either" and "went still" (51–55), pre-warned her about his drift (73), and was caught "performing stillness" by Odile (69). The concrete feature precedes the inference, and the inference matches documented behavior rather than substituting for it. Perceiver: June. Pass.
- "June had been in enough crit rooms to recognize the expensive kind of nothing when it passed her" (line 103) — **the strongest counter-candidate in the chapter.** It credits Odile's walk-past with high communicative power, and it voices June's self-image as a professional looker, which the template says counts as a finding *unless the book frames that self-image critically somewhere the chapter can point to*. Strip test: "she stopped, took in the new page, and moved on without a word" — full action residue. Perceiver: June, named inside the clause itself. Critical framing of the self-image, same chapter: "Skill was, if anything, a liability. Skill wanted to fix things" (line 41), and her trained eye's first output is "a clean, competent drawing of nobody" (line 59). Her connoisseurship is on trial all chapter and loses the first round on the page. Pass — narrowly, and only because the chapter does that framing work.
- "He moved her stool a quarter turn so it faced the window light instead of the door, and stood by it, and that was the wave" (line 29). The clause names what the gesture replaced, not paragraphs it allegedly conveyed; the gesture itself is fully shown. Likewise "The question was settled the way Mara settled questions, by carrying them inside with her" (line 19) — the generalization describes the literal action just performed ("Mara went in"). Both pass.

**Marker 5 (adjective campaigning).** Swept all narrator descriptions of Theo's appearance, movement, and presence: glasses "askew by a few degrees," ear "lower than the glasses pretended," face "rounder than the catalog version," collar point escaped and "He did not know," pad held "like a crate with a loose side" (line 93), a charcoal stub "gray-black up his fingers" (29). Every adjective is deflationary or metrically specific; no mysterious/effortless/cool or synonyms. June receives "coward" (81) from her own free-indirect mouth and a portrait with "one eyebrow departed the page entirely" (97). The chapter's only beauty-adjacent vocabulary is spent on calling the central drawing "ugly. Genuinely, indefensibly ugly" (89). No hits.

## Flagged-risk strip tests (per-line verdicts)

`EARNED — "His glasses sat askew by a few degrees and had clearly sat that way for years because the lean had worn itself into how he held his head" (line 81) — the on-page action that backs it: "The charcoal recorded the lean. It dragged a long patient millimeter at a time" — and the inference is then tested against evidence rather than asserted: "The lean of the glasses was right" (line 91) is a verdict about the drawing, checkable on the page she is holding. The whole passage is anti-publicity: askew glasses, a misplaced ear, an escaped collar point he doesn't know about. "The collar was the truest thing in her sightline" is a draftsman's value judgment with residue (collar point + clamp-lamp edge), perceiver June.`

`EARNED — "and he had gotten the knot. Three minutes, eyes up, and he had gotten the knot." (line 97) — the on-page action that backs it: "the scarf was there, Mara's scarf, wound the way June had actually wound it, the knot off-center and the tail caught under itself." Strip test: the admiring sentence IS the action — it reports a verifiable feature of a physical drawing. Attributable perceiver: June, the only person who knows how the knot was wound, holding the pad. The admiration is for one accurate detail inside a documented wreck ("Her nose had been drawn twice, in two locations, neither of them correct, like a rumor"), and the repetition is June dwelling — which the chapter treats as symptom, not fact: it is what makes her lose the argument at the recycling bin (lines 107–109). The narrator never certifies Theo as attentive; it shows a knot and lets June (and the reader) draw the conclusion.`

`EARNED — "It was, June recognized, his version of helping" (line 49) — backed by the established pattern referenced in the same sentence ("no labels to fix up here and no keys to produce") and immediately complicated rather than endorsed: the helping is what Odile corrects and what wrecks June's first drawing.`

## June-too-perceptive check (chapter-specific risk)

Three credential taps: "the part of her brain that hung shows for a living" (25), "who had installed wall texts for eleven years" (27), "had been in enough crit rooms" (103). Each is biographical fact, and each yields a concrete, scene-checkable observation (six sightlines and a foot-dragged stool; hand-lettered cards with one crossed-out word; Odile's wordless pass). Critically, the text plants her limits alongside: "She was too far away to read which word" (27), "She was nearly sure he had not watched her decide" (109), and the entire first-attempt sequence is her perception failing in close-up. The chapter does not make June brilliant by assertion; it makes her trained, then shows the training malfunction.

## Raw-draft comparison

Synthesis removed the round-01 lines nearest to publicity shapes, and introduced none: "Not a mouth. His." (fragment-stamp crediting a feature) became the grounded "The mouth, lower on the left and a fraction tight, was his."; "the instructions were the social contract of the entire room... legally required to assume" became "it let the entire room call this work"; "ugly as testimony" became "ugly and specific"; Mara's "Luis had made her beautiful" became "made her recognizable" — which also closed the chapter card's "avoid beauty dynamics" order.

## Chapter verdict

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD` — no unattributed publicity. Most admiring surviving line: **"Three minutes, eyes up, and he had gotten the knot."** (line 97). Perceiver: June, free-indirect, holding Theo's pad. It is earned because it is a falsifiable report about a drawing in her hands — the knot is off-center with the tail caught under itself because that is how she wound it that morning — surrounded by the drawing's catalogued failures, and because the book immediately taxes the admiration: it costs June the plan to throw her own drawing away. The narrator describes a knot; June does the falling.

`REVISION ORDERS:` none — zero PUBLICITY lines.

Residual watch (non-blocking, for future June chapters, not an order): the credential-tap construction ("June, who had X for eleven years, registered...") appears three times in this chapter. Each is individually earned here, but the construction is a publicity vector if it recurs without the counterweight of on-page failure this chapter happens to provide. Flag for the tic audit's attention at the next June-POV chapter.
