Novels, and narratives more generally, repeat certain thematic elements again and again. Readers learn to pick up on these instances as important moments when [[texts tell you what they mean|the text is offering explicit clues about their meaning]]. The framing of these moments — the actual words the narrator uses — is very important, and can be mined for clues about the larger significance. For an example of this idea, see [["symbolism'' in The Secret Agent]]. Note the way the "whitewashed wall" comes up again and again in the novel. Note the spatial "descending" metaphors that come up in a few different contexts: the Assistant Commissioner's "descent" into the city's underbelly; Winnie Verloc's resistance to "getting to the bottom of things" and her fear of that fourteen foot drop. See also [[J. Hillis Miller]]'s [[Fiction and Repetition (1982)]]: > "All interpretation is the imposition of a pattern by a certain way of making cross-connections between one sign and those which come before and after" ([[Fiction and Repetition (1982)|p. 144]]).