"its self's soul so much vapor aloft" — the self as a tenant of the body it can no longer reach, the novel's opening…
echoes
From: Incarnations of Burned Children
- Early text: The survivor "lived its life untenanted, a thing among
things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft"; the self has vacated a body that
goes on functioning. [p. 2]
- IJ echo: Hal Incandenza's "I am in here" (scene 001) — the self intact and
present inside a body that can no longer transmit it outward, so that observers
see only a thing making animal sounds. The story's untenanted body and the
novel's trapped-inside self are two faces of one self-as-tenant problem: in the
story the tenant has fled the body; in Hal the tenant is sealed inside it.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation