Each section of this prologue gives, in a different way, an overview of the novel as a whole. At a glance, the Dick-and-Jane motif alerts us to the fact that for the most part the story will be told from a child’s perspective. Just as the Dick-and-Jane primer teaches children how to read, this novel will be about the larger story of how children learn to interpret their world. But there is something wrong with the Dick-and-Jane narrative as it is presented here. Because the sentences are not spread out with pictures, as they would be in an actual reader, we become uncomfortably aware of their shortness and abruptness. The paragraph that these sentences comprise lacks cohesion; it is unclear how each individual observation builds on the last. In the same way, the children in this novel lack ways to connect the disjointed, often frightening experiences that make up their lives. The substance of the narrative, though written in resolutely cheerful language, is also disturbing. Though we are told that the family that lives in the pretty house is happy, Jane is isolated. Not only do her parents and pets refuse to play with her, but they seem to refuse any direct communication with her. When Jane approaches her mother to play, the mother simply laughs, which makes us wonder if the mother actually is, as we have been told, “very nice.” When she asks her father to play, her father only smiles. The lack of connection between sentences mirrors the lack of connection between the individuals in this story.
When the Dick-and-Jane story repeats without divisions between the sentences, its individual components are more connected because they are run together more, but this kind of connection is not a meaningful one. Instead, the meaninglessness of the sequence becomes more noticeable, even shocking, because the sequence is sped up. In the third repetition, when all the words run