How is Nemesis told? It's told by an unknown narrator, at least, for two-thirds of the book the narrator is unknown, but the book begins with someone talking about polio and the neighbourhood in Newark, and he says we, we did this, we did that. We… and I got that idea — it wasn't my own idea, I have very few original ideas — but I got that idea from 100 years ago, reading Madame Bovary.

I was always charmed and interested that in the first chapter of Madame Bovary, first five pages maybe, maybe no more, a voice who had gone… a boy who had gone to school with Charles Bovary who… elementary school, talks about young Charles and so on, and says we, we…  and then you can't find hide nor hair of him again – he is gone; I always liked that. And I thought, I'm going to do that. I liked… and I thought, here you're talking about a community that's in peril, so we is good.  We did this, we thought this, and so on — who is the we? Well, I have to find that out too. And so I found it out when I got to the end of the book and the storyteller turns out to be one of the boys from the playground, from Bucky's playground; moreover, one of the boys who got polio.

So then I go back to the first — second or first chapter — and put in that he's one of the names of the kids who gets polio. And say: so there it is. And what I wanted… I didn't want the I to be Bucky, I didn't… I don't know why... well, you know why?  Because he's not so smart; he's not so smart; I don't want to make him smarter than he is. This is something writers do all the time. A great example would be Bloom in Ulysses, but John Updike did it with his character Rabbit, in those Rabbit books, and he gets… by the way, both Joyce [James Joyce] and Updike get away with it, but it's a trick, and…  but I didn't want to do that with Bucky, because he's an ordinary guy.  And so I… but I wanted somebody who was there, and actually I wound up with this problem, which I solved very easily, I think, and then in the end he emerges much more fully as a voice. And he's crippled, too, by polio, so these two guys who have been crippled by the polio epidemic of 1944 in Newark are talking... talking together.