The italics in general seem to be used simply as a way of setting of a block of text from the surrounding text without any pattern that I can discern, except, I'll grant you, throughout the TV sequence where it does seem pretty clear to serve to indicate that the text is a projection of Shade's imagination since, as you point out, they describe events that Shade could not have knowledge-of; except for the passage beginning, More headlights in the fog, which can't be logically deduced to reside solely in Shade's imagination. In this case the italics are, I assume, intended to convey that sense of unreality. Why? perhaps just to blur the line between reality and imagination.

On Oct 23, 2010, at 3:43 PM, Jansy wrote:

Dear List,

While I was trying to locate PF's verses "man's life as commentary," I realized that, once in a while, the poem admits an "omniscient narrator" perspective, or an external intrusion.
Kinbote acknowledges his "hearsay" evidence (when he relies on Jane Dean's notes, for example). In Shade's poem they are marked by "italics." (when he can know what Hazel said to the busdriver, or how the watchman came from his shack to rescue her, side by side with what describes dialogues heard on the TV or read the inscription on a bark).
I don't know if there are other instances, similar to these.  Nor if the use of "italics" is indicative of various other types of warning signals. Any ideas?

1.    Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
2. He took one look at her, / And shot a death ray at well-meaning Jane.

3. "Sure you don’t mind?/ I’ll catch the Exton plane, because you know / If I don’t come by midnight with the dough —"
4. More headlights in the fog. There was no sense/ In window-rubbing: only some white fence / And the reflector poles passed by unmasked.

5. "I think," she said,/ "I’ll get off here." "It’s only Lochanhead." / "Yes, that’s okay." Gripping the stang, she peered/ 460   At ghostly trees. Bus stopped. Bus disappeared.
6. Out of his lakeside shack/ A watchman, Father Time, all gray and bent, / Emerged with his uneasy dog and went / Along the reedy bank. He came too late.

7. Man’s life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem
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