The keyhole — solipsism and the failure of language to convey the interior

echoes

Early text: "As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes." [the after / dying passage]; the head-speed argument — "many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word," so that "it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts" [mid]; "how exhausting and solipsistic it is to be like this" [after the fraudulence catalogue].
IJ echo: IJ's pervasive solipsism-and-connection problem — Hal's sealed interior behind a competent surface ("I am in here", p. 3), the AA insistence that isolation kills, the novel's whole preoccupation with whether one consciousness can reach another. Neal's keyhole is the same gap the novel builds its loneliness theme around; the story is Wallace's most compact single image of it.
Weight: restatement (oeuvre-scoped)