a man who could only speak through a fiction · S6
he was no longer able to converse or communicate on any topic without bringing it back to the program. The topic. Without some system of references to the program.
Context
Steeply's father ends in a terminal solipsism where every channel out of him runs through a television show: he can no longer converse on any subject except by translating it into MAS*H, and his most passionate correspondence is savage letters to a fictional character who does not exist, mailed to a made-up address in a war that ended decades before. Real people become unreachable while a fiction becomes the only interlocutor; the apparatus of contact stays fully operational and connects him to no one who is actually there.