Ennet House: Ewell's dermo-taxonomy

Ewell's whole tattoo obsession is the white-collar mind processing raw plainness the only way it knows how: by classifying it. He builds headings and phyla ("First there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded… types," then the stoic-regret second category, then Bikers as a third), takes the residents' irrevocable marks as data to be "watched and charted and cross-referenced," and keeps re-stating one "abstract but not very profound idea… over and over, obsessively almost." It's irony's cousin — the educated reflex to hold experience at the distance of a system rather than take it at face value. The residents just have the tattoos; Ewell needs a taxonomy of them, and the gap between the having and the cataloguing is the scene's register.