Cages

Bars, cribs, and traps make encagement the book's figure for addiction and fame — the sense of a self locked in from which the advertised exit is a lie. The anchor is Joelle's p. 222 formulation: "What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage.... The entrance says EXIT. There isn't an exit," a cage that "has entered her." Lyle supplies the fame-version — "Fame is not the exit from any cage" (p. 389) — and the pattern proliferates through hands that make cages (Rusk, Harv, Hal) and literal enclosures: hair "like a cell's glossy bars," cages over the lightbulbs, Gately praying "like a rat that's learned one route in the maze." It culminates in the lobster traps, "little cages of cross-hatched bars… so the eyes looked out at open sea" (pp. 883-892), and in Orin under the roach-tumbler, where "cage and ocean images associated with Gately in this chapter are associated with Orin" — "still caged." The motif insists that the prisons here are ones the self carries inward.