Anhedonia and It (pp. 693–694)
Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn’t because of standard U.S. anhedonia. Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being—but in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne. […] His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.
Context
The essay's E.T.A. case for species one: Hal, empty inside his own hull, manipulating joie and value like variables, his mother conversing with her own echoes. The one feeling left — loneliness — is scene 001's "I am in here" read from the other side, a year early. (Carlisle isolates the single most proleptic word: "yet.")