Hal's hero essay
But what comes next? What North American hero can hope to succeed the placid Frank? We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.
Context
The closing prediction of Hal's seventh-grade essay for Mr. Ogilvie, written one year after Himself's suicide: what succeeds the hero of reaction is a hero "divorced from all stimulus." Anhedonia as the terminal stage of the American hero, predicted by the kid who will end the book's chronology mute, supine, and carried — the single most prophetic sentence about horizontal Hal anywhere before the essay.