Empty predation as solipsism — B.I. #20 and the GON continuity
echoes
From: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (the title-story cycle)
- Early text: B.I. #20's self-diagnosis: "I realized I had never
loved anyone."; his seductive practice exposed as "To gaze and not see, to
eat and not be full. Not just to feel but be empty."; his rhetorical
self-armory (the "pained-confession-of-true-motive tactic").
- IJ echo: The Granola Cruncher narrator's emptiness is GON's fraudulence
in the register of sex — a self that performs connection while being unable
to feel it, until another person's apparent access to real connection (the
focus, the soul-connection with the rapist) exposes the void. Same
communication-solipsism engine as GON and the depressed person; here
gendered and predatory.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation (oeuvre-scoped)