Heads & skulls

Heads are the book's central containers, targets, and relics — the place where its "I am in here" (p. 3) is spoken and where, in Hal's answer, he expects "[w]here I'm going to occur as a player" (p. 461). The novel opens with Hal "surrounded by heads and bodies" and returns obsessively to the skull as a thing that can be dug up (Hal exhuming his father's head), microwaved (the heading announcing JOI "TOOK HIS OWN LIFE BY PUTTING HIS HEAD IN A MICROWAVE OVEN"), inventoried ("It's the heads they're working on here, boys."), or detached and floated off. Gately's "massive and almost perfectly square head" becomes a running fixture, and the acid flask's "enormous half-eaten-away skull" makes the memento mori explicit — a Yorick for a book preoccupied with what a head holds and how it fails. The grave-dream and the final chapter braid these strands, ending on Gately's head "leaving his shoulders" as Fackelmann dies before a big square screen. The head is where consciousness is trapped, and the skull is what's left when it isn't.