the founder’s motto comes down

The usurper redecorating the dead king's house, in one gesture. "After Mario's father Dr. Incandenza passed away, the new Headmaster, Dr. Charles Tavis, a Canadian citizen, either Mrs. Incandenza's half-brother or adoptive brother, depending on the version" — the ambiguous-origin uncle, his kinship itself unfixed "depending on the version" — took down the founder's own locker-room motto and hung his own. The dead man's dark, grand aphorism (they can kill you but they can't eat you) comes down; up goes the successor's "more upbeat" self-help slogan. The Claudius move rendered as interior decoration: the new administration's first act on the wall of the house it inherited is to erase the founder's words and substitute its own brighter, emptier ones. The succession isn't only who runs the school — it's whose sentences hang over it.