the choosing debate: inventing sides
This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. […] You speak to yourself, inventing sides.
Context
The ironist's most efficient defense: don't even wait for the sincere statement, pre-emptively ventriloquize it and mock the puppet. Steeply keeps supplying Marathe's earnest side ("Now the story of the rich man," "And now here we go. Now you will say…") and arguing with the version he invents, so that Marathe's actual belief never has to be heard — "I am not even here, possibly, for listening to." Against this, Steeply's flat creed, "It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us—these are just the hazards of being free," is the flippancy defending itself as freedom. The debate's substance is entertainment-self's; its manner — earnest accent vs. tactical American irony, the manufactured strawman-sincerity — is the register war itself, conducted as dialogue.