"For whom is the Funhouse fun?" — metafiction critiqued from inside, and the story-as-Funhouse-that-wounds-a-lover…

echoes

Early text: quote epigraph: "For whom is the Funhouse fun?" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p4]; Mark's counter-program: "The way to make a story a Funhouse is to put the story itself in one. For a lover. Make the reader a lover, who wants to be inside. Then do him." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p659]; and the confessed desire: "Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p663].
IJ echo: IJ's own status as an anti-Entertainment — a difficult, wounding, un-lulling work set against the seductive-passive entertainment it depicts; DFW's program of fiction that reaches and hurts the reader awake rather than pacifying (the Entertainment's making as a doomed attempt to reach someone, and the anti-Entertainment / book-as-samizdat family of readings — both developed further in the archive's theories about the Entertainment's purpose). No single scene keys this; the nearest anchors are JOI's motive for making the cartridge (JOI life/death, scene 020, pp. 63–65) and Molly Notkin's account of the Entertainment's design (scene 159, pp. 787–795).
Weight: prefiguration