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not what he marks with.
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And so, it's as if the whole tradition comes out and grabs
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him and names him.
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And so, Uncle Karl's efforts to interpret the incident of the bee
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and its relation to the mark on his face suggests the way that certain
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kinds of tradition-- that Uncle Karl has been reading,
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probably in the Book of Knowledge encyclopedia
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that he sells door to door
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(he's a sort of scholarly guy)--that that tradition
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has named him.
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He has no agency in this trajectory he's entering upon.
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The effort to take the story of his birth and tell it as if it were