Narrative Processes: The Second Scene

Not everything can be of pulsating interest in a story: the reader can get tired. It is necessary to allow images and concepts to be directed calmly. Just as in a painting the luminous contrast of chiaroscuro is required, in the narration rest is required. It is a possibility so that the most important passages can be appreciated.
A second quiet scene is seen in Somerset Maugham's Razor's Edge:
"You might ask why. If I have turned Paul Gauguin into an Englishman, I could not do the same with the characters in this book. The answer is simple: I couldn't. They wouldn't be who they are. I do not claim that they are North Americans, as they see themselves; They are North Americans seen through the eye of an Englishman. I have not tried to reproduce the peculiarities of their language. The failure of the writers, in trying to do so, can only be equaled to the failure of the American writers when they attempt to reproduce English as it is spoken in England. The dialect is a trap. Henrv Tames, in his insr1e «es stories, used it constantly, but never exartitly, as does an indie. so that instead of praising the intended familiar effects, it is often shocking to the English reader.

In 1919, I was accidentally in Chicago, on my way to the Far East, and for reasons that have nothing to do with this narrative, I had to stay there for two or three weeks. A short time before, I had published a novel that was quite successful, and since at the moment I was something worthy of publicity, I was interviewed as soon as I arrived. The next morning the phone rang. I answered the call, "(Cf. Complementary bibliography, N? 34)
To reinforce what I have explained, I quote another example, found in The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway:
"It saddened the boy to see the old man return every day with his empty boat, and he always came down to help him carry the coils of fishing line or the boat hook and the harpoon and the sail coiled to the mast. The sail was mended with sacks of flour and, rolled up, looked like a flag in permanent defeat.
The old man was skinny and gangly, with deep lines at the back of his neck. The brown spots of benign skin cancer, which the sun produces with its reflections on the tropical sea, were on his cheeks. These freckles ran down the sides of his face all the way down, and his hands bore the deep scars caused by handling the ropes when holding large fish. But none of these scars were recent. They were as old as the erosions of an arid desert. "(Cf. Complementary bibliography, N9 27)