the eloquence nobody in the room can hear — "Please don't think I don't care…"

From the inside the speech is fluent, warm, and pleading, a person insisting on his own interiority ("I'm not a machine. I feel and believe") and asking only to be talked with. The reader gets the words verbatim; the Deans get something that makes one of them whisper "Sweet mother of Christ." The theme's cruelty is that both are true at once, the passage true to Hal and the horror true to the room, with no channel between them.