Suicide is a trapped person's least-bad exit, argued by a submersion/entrapment analogy that anticipates Infinite…
echoes
From: The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing
- Early text:
[quote|scene] The narrator explains that the Bad Thing makes
self-destruction seem the only exit because the Bad Thing is the self, and he
reaches for a drowning-with-no-surface image to convey why (Amherst Review
pp. 29-30 — paraphrase from the scan).
- IJ echo: The burning-high-rise passage (scene 135, pp. 696-697): "The
person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill
herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a
burning high-rise" — falling is not desired; it is the lesser of two terrors.
- Weight: prefiguration