Close Reading: Diction

The slightly elevated diction of Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine describes the unusual feelings and tolerance the narrator feels for escaltors in his everyday work place. His clincally suggestive admiration is expressed through metaphors like "the free-standing kind: a pair of integral signs swooping upward" and "a temporary, steeper escalator of daylight" make the paragragh slightly a straightforward connotative buisnesslike description of the way the narrator sees escaltors. Baker's rifind, scholarly yet straightforward lexicon describes the escalator through a simile to express the smooth and gracefulness "like the radians of black luster that ride the undulating outer edge." The author uses a unique and different technique to convey the seen surroundings of a typical place like where he works.