Read this excerpt from infinite jest. i cannot make myself understood. ‘i am not just a jock,’ i say slowly. distinctly. ‘my transcript for the last year might have been dickied a bit, maybe, but that was to get me over a rough spot. the grades prior to that are de moi.’ my eyes are closed; the room is silent. how does the narration affect the narrator’s credibility in this excerpt?

His explanations depict him as a bit defensive.

Explanation:

Being on the defensive is a seemingly self-protective attitude when a danger is foreseen or someone who can do us harm. Based on this, we can see that the narrator of the text is on the defensive because he tries to protect himself from his past mistakes by persuading people to believe that he is able to work hard and succeed, as he can prove through his prior grades.

word count 168

serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.