And All the Girls Were Nude — A Closer Reading

The Narrator's Ironic Voice

The narrator adopts a tone of mock moral outrage that grows more exaggerated as the story progresses. Early on, the description of Evergood's apartment walls as having reached "the point of saturation" in photographic content is delivered with deadpan precision. The list of what is not on the walls—no Grand Canyon, no Indian on a horse—is followed by a pointed correction: there is a "red-skinned maiden," but she is posed provocatively. This rhetorical move, setting up an expectation and then subverting it, recurs throughout. The narrator also uses legalistic phrasing—"at the investigation he ventured a very rough but conservative guess"—to lend a spurious authority to Evergood's own accounting of his collection. The effect is a voice that seems to be winking at the reader, complicit in the very prurience it purports to condemn.

The Inventions and Their Fate

Evergood's inventions—a "wonderful prismatic lens" and special glasses—are mentioned only briefly in the excerpts, but their role is crucial. They are presented as the technical means by which his photographic obsession is realized, yet the story gives no explanation of how they work. Instead, the lens and glasses are treated as physical evidence, seized along with the photograph collection. In the final paragraphs, the narrator notes that the police chief now wears "thick-lensed glasses" to beauty contests and is a major customer for "Real-lifecolor film." This detail, offered as rumor, suggests that the inventions have been repurposed by the very authority that punished Evergood. The story thus implies a cycle of hypocrisy: the official who condemned the old man may be using the same technology for similar ends.

The Trial and Its Aftermath

The trial is described in a single compressed paragraph: "Never in the history of the city had there been such a hue and a cry." Evergood is sentenced to five years for "possession of pornography, indecent exposure and other charges." The judge calls the sentence "far too lenient." But the story does not dwell on the legal proceedings; instead, it shifts to the fate of the collection, which now fills "fourteen huge, well-worn cabinets" in police files, always available for inspection by "any anti-sin committeeman." The final image—the scratched lenses in the chief's open cabinet—suggests that the evidence has become a resource for the very moral guardians who sought to suppress it. The narrator's repeated assertion that "the case is long past and closed" feels deliberately hollow, undercut by the ongoing availability of the collection.

The story's structure—from secret obsession to public scandal to quiet co-option—invites attention to how it handles point of view. The narrator never enters Evergood's mind; we see only his actions and their consequences. The inventions, barely described, function more as plot devices than as technological marvels. Readers may want to track how the story balances its sensational subject matter with a deadpan, almost bureaucratic tone, and whether the ironic distance holds throughout. The epilogue, with its hint of the chief's own interest, rewards a second reading.

That book about Nathanial and his secret lens stayed with me the way a half-remembered dream does. There’s something so quiet and unsettling about how a public face can hide a whole inner life. It reminded me of the raw, creeping dread in The curse of Yig — Background and Themes, that sense of something ancient waiting just beneath ordinary ground, patient and unaware of the mundane world above it.