a man who could only speak through a fiction — "the letters were addressed to Major…" · S6
the letters were addressed to Major Burns. Not to Maury Linville. And not c/o Fox Studios or wherever, but addressed to an involved military address, with a Seoul routing code.
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.