Maps (eliminating one's map)

This is the novel's private idiom for death: to die is to have your map eliminated, a face wiped from existence. The phrase is planted early, in the note where "death as the elimination of a map" arrives beside the "homolosine-cartography" patent, and Wallace flags it explicitly around page 128 as an image that "will also recur." From there it migrates across every register — a real corpse gets "a thoroughly eliminated personal map," suicide becomes "the elimination of a map" two hundred pages before Eschaton, and the political mode surfaces in the all-caps threat "WILLING TO ELIMINATE OWN MAP OUT OF SHEER PIQUE." The idiom binds JOI's suicide (who "[e]liminated his own map"), Lenz's face-as-map, Clipperton, Fackelmann, and the Moms's wiped-off-the-map home town into one lethal cartography. Its keystone is Eschaton, where metaphorical map-elimination has stood for death "throughout the novel" and the threat of literal map-elimination could compromise the game "for all time," and its philosophical inversion is the anhedoniac's "The world becomes a map of the world" — the map swallowing the world rather than the reverse.