Negation

I noticed something about the sentence structure of Loving that I've been pondering but have come to no specific conclusions over. It's also something that I noticed more so in the first part of the book--I'm not sure if that's become I became sucked in to other things (the plot, character dynamics, etc.) or if it's because it disappeared entirely. Has anyone else noticed that often, the character's actions are illustrated by what they do not do as opposed to what they do do? Of course, the latter occurs more often, but I'm intrigued by the first's presence.

The first one I noticed is on page 19: "'Why, you gave me a jump,' she said, not startled." This directly contradicts her statement. On page 20: "He did not get a laugh." On page 22: "She could not see Violet because he was in the way." On page 23: "With her back to the light he could not see her mouth and nose." Also on page 23: "...gold male children without wings..." What's the point of the "without" here? What do we gain by it? On page 25: "He went so soft he might have been a ghost without a head." On page 32: "Miss Burch did not look delighted." Additionally, throughout these first pages, there's a whole bunch of "not," "never," "don't" and so on. There seems to be a lot of characters not doing things. However, I kept my eyes peeled for these patterns and began to see them less, and then forgot to look for them entirely. Am I overanalyzing, or is there something here?

It reminds me of our brief talk on Tuesday about how it would be interesting not only to look at the character's relationships to one another, but also the lack of relationships between people. There seems to be a similar interesting negation here with the language.