the self reported in the third person

Asked point-blank whether he was the one who found their father dead in the microwave, Hal answers about himself in the third person, in flat legal register, converting the most searing fact of his life into a line from a report about a named party. The self-distancing is total and reflexive: the thing happened to a Harold James Incandenza, not to the "I" on the phone, and holding it that far out at arm's length is the same move, grown to catastrophe, that leaves him unreachable inside his own body in the admissions room.