freak accident on the quadrangle of the campus where he teaches. After
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to save his own teaching job, and as he becomes more corrupt, to work
his way to the top of his university’s English department.z The original opening of this novel reads, in part, as follows:
Crossing the Quad at noon on a grey Halloween, Nelson
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enough, he hadn’t been hurrying as he usually did at this time of
day, and anyway, Nelson was a tall fellow, standing a full head
taller than many of the young people around him. If anyone
could see where he was going, it was Nelson Humboldt. ...But today Nelson was unusually distracted, and this, he decided
later, was the reason for the accident. He had just come from
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department, where Nelson was a lecturer, and just ten minutes
before she had told him compassionately but briskly that the
department was being forced by budget necessities to terminate
his appointment at the end of the semester. ... Nelson had no
savings to speak of and no prospects, the job market being what
it was, and now he was about to have to no job, and he moved
much more slowly than usual through the press on the Quad,
still in shock, his mind elsewhere, letting himself be buffeted
by the currents and eddies of passing students. The loss of his
¿QJHUZDVMXVWWKHODVWVWUDZz This opening doesn’t work on either the micro level of sentences and
phrases or the macro level of the narrative as a whole. Many of the
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the reader or suggest something about the narrative to come. The
opening is nothing but exposition—an undramatic summary—and there
is no evocative detail.