Middlesex 4

"Lefty cleaned them. Making himself useful as always, he took upon himself the Sisyphean task of keeping all those Modernist surfaces sparkling. With the same concentration he trained on the aorist tense of ancient Greek verbs-- a tense so full of weariness it specified actions that might never be completed-- Lefty now cleaned the huge picture windows, the fogged glass of the greenhouse, the sliding doors that led to the courtyard, and even the skylights. As he was Windexing the new house, however, Chapter Eleven and I were exploring it. Or, should I say, them."
Page 260, Chapter 3, Book 3

In this passage, the narrator describes her/his grandfather's quest to clean the huge windows of their new house, aptly named Middlesex. The short sentences and the diction of the paragraph has a tone of nostalgia, while the mood is one of sadness, because the narrator has previously hinted that Lefty is soon to die. The narrator also makes an intertextual comparison between Lefty's task of cleaning the windows and the story of Sisyphus, who was condemned after he died to always be pushing a rock up a hill and never be able to reach the summit. This parallels the thankless task of trying to keep a house of huge windows clean, especially a house with small children. The narrator also uses the symbolism of a certain tense of ancient Greek verbs, portraying a never-ending task and also juxtaposing itself against Lefty's lack of weariness in this task.