# Chapter 21 Narrator-Publicist Audit — Round 1

Scope per `checks/audits/narrator_publicist.md`. Protagonist: Theo (POV). Favored characters stressed: Odile, June (present via painted objects). Stress targets from the round order: (1) narration certifying Theo as "honest now," (2) the faced-to-wall portrait as trophy of restraint, (3) over-clean interpretation of Odile's partial confession, (4) the keys/hands-empty ending as authorial absolution.

## Narrator-attitude check (step 4)

READING_GUIDE §1 declares close third, dual POV, no publicist-by-design narrator. §2 interiority discipline: "Feelings are rendered through action, object, and dialogue first." §5: care moves must never be captioned ("never announce"). No declared unreliable-narrator license exists for Theo's chapters. Findings therefore stand as narrator failures, not characterization of a narrator. Additionally: the voice card for Theo bans "polished aphorisms about care" even in his own mouth — so a close-third gloss that adjudicates care in aphorism form cannot be excused as free-indirect Theo.

Prior-audit cross-check: the codex adversarial-register audit logged the `If she ever wanted... / If she never did...` parallelism as a surviving near-miss and left "object-agency" phrasing to a later Claude pass. This audit takes up that deferral and rules against one limb (finding 5 below). The previously watch-listed phrase "painted side keeping its own counsel against the brick" is confirmed already repaired — current text reads "painted side against the brick" (line 115).

## PUBLICITY findings

- `PUBLICITY — marker 4 — "she wrote her own initials, *O.M.*, small and square, the lender owning the loan." (line 59) — strip test: what action remains: "she came back into the stockroom, took the pen off its string, and next to his entry on the loan sheet, *out Thurs 11/19*, she wrote her own initials, *O.M.*, small and square" — attributable perceiver: NONE.` The appositive is a narrator caption translating Odile's gesture into its noble meaning — accountability, ownership, the partial confession completed in ink. It is exactly the over-clean reading of Odile the round order warns against, and it violates §5's no-announcing rule. The gesture's placement (her initials beside his entry, under the loan she originated) already says everything the caption says. The clause is not Theo's thought — it sits in narratorial apposition, uninflected by his syntax, and no on-page perceiver owns it.

- `PUBLICITY — marker 5 — "The looking was the part he'd skipped in Week 3." (line 79) — strip test: what action remains: "He looked at it a long time before he touched anything." — attributable perceiver: NONE.` This is the narrator grading present-Theo against past-Theo and awarding the growth: honest-looking asserted rather than left to the reader. The contrast already exists in action — line 77 states he "painted it fast, from memory, in a state he had refused at the time to name," and line 79's first sentence shows the long look. The second sentence is a scorecard appended to a scene that had already scored itself. Direct hit on stress target 1 ("honest now").

- `PUBLICITY — marker 5 — "until the boundary stopped being an unfinished place and became a described one: hair ending where his knowledge of it ended, and the ending itself made accurate." (line 87) — strip test: what action remains: "He worked the edge wet, dragged the ochre-white into the ground" — attributable perceiver: NONE.` "Made accurate" is honesty asserted by the narrator as an achieved property of the repair. The technique is on the page; the optical fact is on the page earlier in the same paragraph ("the edge of the hair going from paint to glow to gone"); the appended clause exists only to certify that the consent-limited edge is now a moral success. This is the narration telling the reader how to admire the consent work.

- `PUBLICITY — marker 5 — "that part was true and remembering it was not a crime, only everything he had built on top of the remembering." (line 87) — strip test: what action remains: "Around eight the scarf knot got its half hour, the slip to the left, the one loop looser than the other, and he had that from memory too. He kept it because he had it" — attributable perceiver: NONE.` The narrator performs the guilt arithmetic — this part innocent, that part culpable — and hands the reader a settled verdict in a balanced aphorism. It is the consent ethics adjudicated instead of enacted, and it launders the study's origin by pre-sorting which portion the reader may hold against Theo. The scarf-knot specifics and "He kept it because he had it" carry the entire beat without the ruling.

- `PUBLICITY — marker 4 — "If she ever wanted to turn it around, it was findable, dated, and named. If she never did, it would stand there being hers to not look at." (line 93) — strip test: what action remains: NONE — attributable perceiver: NONE.` Every fact in these two sentences is already staged as action in the same paragraph: the pencil label is quoted verbatim ("*Study - J. Park - begun wk 3, finished 12/4 - T. Brennan*"), the orientation is given ("painted side faced to the wall, the labeled bar outward where anyone walking through the stockroom could read exactly what was there and no one could see it"), and the non-delivery is given ("He did not put it in a crate."). The conditionals add only design rationale — a plaque mounted beside the object explaining why the disposition is ethically correct, with "hers to not look at" crediting the standing panel with the full communicative power of a consent contract. This is the exact mechanism by which the faced-to-wall portrait becomes a trophy of restraint: not by the object, which is right, but by the narration exhibiting it.

## EARNED and counter-candidates examined

- `EARNED — "That was the order his hands did things in: count first, feel later." — the on-page action that backs it: "He had the utility knife out of his pocket before he had his coat off... Eight catalogs, each one wrapped in tissue"` (line 3). The maxim is a description of a sequence the scene has just performed; strip it and the sequence still stands.
- `EARNED — "she looked back at him with no more preparation than she gave a wall." — the on-page action that backs it: "'I opened the door. There was nothing to sign.'"` (lines 19–21). Tested as marker 1 (unreadability claim) for Odile. Attributable perceiver: Theo, whose reading of Odile the scene immediately proves fallible — he asks her for absolution and receives "It was partly your fault." His perception is on the page as his, and it is wrong about what she will give him.
- `EARNED — "she had found that, she had actually found the filled nail hole and given it four square inches." — the on-page action that backs it: "a filled nail hole a shade off from the wall around it"` (line 67). Admiration of June, perceiver Theo, backed by a countable fact of the described canvas.
- Counter-candidate, ruled pass: "She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it." (line 71). Tested as over-clean decoding of June's painting. Attributable perceiver: Theo, mid-epiphany; the reading is backed object-by-object in line 67 (tended jars, seated towel roll, the bright unreached twelve-by-sixteen "that the hands in the foreground were too busy to walk toward"), and the self-image it replaces ("a fond portrait of a man who did things") is framed critically in the same paragraph. Self-indictment, not publicity. Watch on reprise: if Ch 22 restates this decoding, it becomes lecture.
- Counter-candidate, ruled pass: "he was not going to invent a cheekbone he'd never witnessed just to close a shape" (line 87). Volition-report whose action lands on the page twice: "The unpainted cheek stayed unpainted" (line 89). The principle-statement survives because the reader needs the reason the cheek is bare (otherwise the panel reads unfinished, not restrained). The violation is not this line but the certification clauses stacked after it (finding 3).
- Counter-candidate, ruled pass: "It made the picture harder to look at. He kept it." (line 85). "Harder to look at" is a perceptual claim backed by the specified geometry change (door narrowed from "generous welcoming angle" to "a door that could complete its swing in either direction"); "He kept it" is an action.
- Counter-candidate, ruled pass: "It was accurate on purpose, from her end, and he made himself write it accurately from his." (line 11). Tested as "honest now" certification. Survives on residue: the specific entry "*8 rtn'd 12/4, via R. Kim / S. Rivera.* Not via J. Park" is quoted, and the sentence's primary content is the sting (June engineered the accuracy against him), not his virtue. Borderline; do not add a second volition-gloss anywhere in this passage during revision.
- `EARNED — "walked home through the cold with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty." (line 117) — the on-page action that backs it: "'I'm keeping the keys. The freight, the condition reports, the loan sheet.'" (line 53) and "He did not put it in a crate." (line 93).` Stress target 4 examined directly: the image is uncaptioned — no "for the first time," no adjudicating clause — and both halves are literal consequences of on-page decisions (he kept the job; he delivered nothing). It is the most admiring surviving line in the chapter and it passes because the narration reports contents of pockets and hands, not their meaning. Condition of pass: it stays uncaptioned. Any revision that appends interpretation to this sentence converts it to a finding.

## Chapter verdict

`PUBLICIST-FOUND (5 lines)`

The publicity here is not mystique-and-danger campaigning; it is moral campaigning — the narrator certifying honesty ("made accurate," "the part he'd skipped"), adjudicating guilt ("not a crime"), and captioning consent gestures ("the lender owning the loan," "hers to not look at"). The chapter's objects — the loan sheet, the narrowed door, the bare cheek, the labeled stretcher bar, the uncrated panel — do all of this work already. Every finding is a clause that repeats the object's work as a verdict.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. Line 59 — "she wrote her own initials, *O.M.*, small and square, the lender owning the loan." Cut the appositive; end the sentence at "small and square." The placement of the initials beside his entry, under *out Thurs 11/19*, is the confession; no gloss. Do not replace with another interpretive tag — the following sentence (clipboard hung "one degree straighter") already closes the beat in action.
2. Line 79 — "The looking was the part he'd skipped in Week 3." Cut the sentence. The paragraph before it establishes he painted the study "fast, from memory," and the sentence before it shows the long look; the comparison is the reader's to make. If a beat is needed to hold the pause, replace with a material fact of the looking (what the strip lights do to the panel, how long the dust fur takes to brush off the glassine) — a thing seen, not a lesson drawn.
3. Line 87 — "until the boundary stopped being an unfinished place and became a described one: hair ending where his knowledge of it ended, and the ending itself made accurate." Cut everything after "dragged the ochre-white into the ground." The optical fact is already on the page in the same paragraph ("from paint to glow to gone"); if the sentence needs a landing, end it on a paint fact of the reworked edge (what the wet-dragged boundary does under the strip lights), not on a certification of its honesty.
4. Line 87 — "He kept it because he had it; that part was true and remembering it was not a crime, only everything he had built on top of the remembering." End the sentence at "He kept it because he had it." The guilt arithmetic is deleted, not softened: no substitute clause apportioning what was and wasn't culpable. The reader has the origin of the study (line 77) and can run the ledger.
5. Line 93 — "If she ever wanted to turn it around, it was findable, dated, and named. If she never did, it would stand there being hers to not look at." Cut both sentences. The paragraph already contains every fact they assert, as action: label quoted, orientation stated, legibility from the doorway stated. The paragraph should run from "...anyone walking through the stockroom could read exactly what was there and no one could see it" directly to "He did not put it in a crate." That sequence is the consent design, enacted; the conditionals are the museum placard. This supersedes the codex adversarial-register near-miss ruling on the same parallelism: the parallelism does not "encode consent choices around a physical object" — the object encodes them, and the parallelism narrates the encoding.
