Fraudulence, anhedonic emptiness, and the sealed self — the Hal-condition register outside the novel

echoes

Early text: the fraudulence paradox: "the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside—you were a fraud." [logic-course ¶]; Beverly's diagnostic-machine image: "some piece of ultra-expensive new medical or diagnostic equipment that can discern more about you in one quick scan than you could ever know about yourself—but the equipment doesn’t care about you, you’re just a sequence of processes and codes" [late]; and the coda's description of the dead classmate — the "neon aura around him all the time of scholastic and athletic excellence" [final ¶].
IJ echo: Hal's condition in IJ — the high-functioning surface (athletic and scholastic excellence) over an interior that feels hollow, unreachable, unable to feel or connect; the boy who is in here but cannot make it read from outside. The coda's "neon aura … of scholastic and athletic excellence" is nearly a description of how Hal appears to others just as he is going dark.
Weight: shared-preoccupation (oeuvre-scoped)