Mario's birth & defects: the irony that bounces
the sort of lurchy half-stumble of a vaudeville inebriate, body tilted way forward as if into a wind, right on the edge of pitching face-first onto the ground
Context
The narration itself keeps aiming irony at Mario and keeps failing to dent him. The whole birth-defect catalog is delivered in a register of grotesque vaudeville comedy — the reptilian/dinosaurian look, the "oddly friendly pirate's squint," this drunk-comedian lurch — a mock-clinical, faintly cruel prose that treats the body as a running gag. And Mario is completely undentable by it. The gap between the ironizing voice and its unmockable subject is the register point in structural form: the book can narrate Mario ironically all it likes, but the irony bounces, because the one thing irony cannot get purchase on is a person with nothing hidden for it to expose.