Hunched figures

The hunched posture — bent over in waiting, vomiting, or addiction — is the novel's keyword for "tension before violent release." It opens on the "defecatory posture" of waiting (p. 9); Schacht's stall gives the motif its keynote phrase, the "hunched timeless millennial type of waiting" (p. 103); and it recurs through Poor Tony "hunched behind a lightpoal," Marathe "hunched slightly" in the interface choreography, the "hunched, ill, pitched-forward father," and the raw self-recognition of "This hunched spurting pale guy is not any me I ever recognize." (pp. 263-264). The image bends bodies at the moment of maximum strain or shame, and the final chapter makes it explicit as its governing keyword: a military policeman "hunched drunk over his notebook," Fackelmann "hunched before Mt. Dilaudid," Wayne hunched in pre-match ritual. What the hunch encodes is the body braced just before something is expelled, released, or lost — the coiled precursor to the book's violences and collapses.