The pleasure/pain calculus and the love-vs-need bind — the interpolations IJ dramatizes

echoes

Early text: the interpolations — "Is the real point of my life simply to undergo as little pain and as much pleasure as possible?" (with its follow-through: "But isn’t this kind of a selfish way to live? Forget selfish—isn’t it awful lonely?"); "Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly?"; and the bind's dead end — "so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons. Is there any way out of this bind?" [interpolations] [e-text]
IJ echo: The novel's core moral machinery — the pleasure/pain calculus the Entertainment and the Substances exploit (pleasure as the point of life → anhedonia and death); and the love-vs-need bind that AA, Gately, and the Marathe/Steeply debates turn on (can you love what you only need; the self's cage broken only by giving oneself away). The interpolations are the bald moral questions IJ spends a thousand pages dramatizing rather than asking outright.
Weight: shared-preoccupation