I completely disagree that Smith thought there was an "invisible force", as the narrator claims.

Wilde uses the story to explain and expand the theory, which the story's unnamed narrator claims is the only one to fit exactly with the poet's words.

Nică follows the path of transhumance and is assigned to the care of shepherds, but he himself falls ill with what the narrator claims was cholera, and, upon returning home with a high fever, is instantly cured with a folk remedy of vinegar and lovage.

The Lisbon sisters, the narrator claims, "have scarred us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives."

The narrative is stuffed with prose letters and lyric poems that the narrator claims were in truth exchanged by the unhappy lovers and put in the book at the behest of his lady.

The narrator claims,"I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots."

"Annus Mirabilis" (Year of Wonder), also from that volume, contains the frequently quoted observation that sexual intercourse began in 1963, which the narrator claims was "rather late for me": this despite Larkin having started his own sexual career in 1945.

(lines 1-4) She may be, as the narrator claims, the "sweetest thing that ever grew" (line 6), but she is dead, as the narrator explains:

The true story, the narrator claims, of boys in a reformatory and the revenge they later take.