White Flag: the too-insipid-to-mention banners

The narration sets its own register in the opening pages by performing exactly the reflex the whole scene is about to interrogate. It won't even quote the felt banners in "Cub-Scoutish blue and gold" — they "appear way too insipid even to mention" — and then it mentions one anyway, as an "E.g.," deadpan. That tiny self-catch is the theme in miniature: the sophisticated voice that finds the slogans beneath quotation is nonetheless standing in a room the slogans are keeping alive, and the scene will spend twenty pages closing the gap between the insipid surface and what the surface covers.