I'm currently doing a reread of IJ, so this is my second go at this section. And I must admit, this section was almost a throwaway for me the first time. It was very frustrating, and my strategy was to barrel my way through as quickly as possible and move on. However (as I'm noticing for most of the novel), things are much more relevant and interesting the second time.
But anyway, sorry for the big lead-in, but basically, my read this time around is that this section, my be narrated by, as others suggested, someone who is either mentally disabled, but I am leaning more towards someone to whom English is not their native language, and only learned English in an ineffective, natural absorptive context, rather than having any specific instruction. My experience of the common mistakes made by non-native speakers is the trend of using etymologically linked words, yet the wrong part of speech, syntactically. As in, using the infinitive ("cry") instead of the gerundive ("crying"). Also, the biggest mistake that's repeated often is the use of the substantive rather than the copula form of "to be" when constructing these gerundive phrases - "be cry" rather than "is crying." While this is typical of black american ebonics anyway, this differentiation is often the hardest to learn - a parallel that many people will understand if they've ever taken Spanish is between the verbs "ser" and "estar" that establish this same problem when learning to differentiate the two, as both translate to "to be." The English copula and substantive have an absurd amount of conjugations - to be, I am, you are, they are, we were, he was, etc etc - and it's understandable that these would get confused. I do agree that it is probably a black narrator, as evidenced by the culturally "black" names and contexts used, but my limited experience with learners of English echoed most strongly when dealing with immigrants from Affrica, whose languages often lack the subtleties in their verb forms that are what make English one of the hardest, most complicated languages to learn.
So, in short, I thought this section was pretty sweet, for the linguistically-minded.
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