IJ study archive

Fackelmann, Sunshine, and the beach

quote

And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

Context

Carlisle reads Chapter 28 whole as "the stillness — the horizontality — of Gately and Hal": twin heroes gone flat, Gately's bottom balanced against Hal's slide into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. Recorded as his reading, not adopted — but the novel's final sentence does leave Gately supine, alone, at low tide, in the horizontal position the theme's Non-Action thread keys to.

In anthology