Hal horizontal in Viewing Room 5 (pp. 901–902)
I lay in my tight little sarcophagus of space. The horizontality piled up all around me. I was the meat in the room’s sandwich. […] I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.
Context
Hal surrenders to the horizontal and the scene turns the viewing posture into a coffin he finds comfortable. The Viewing Room is inventoried as pure horizontality — the recliners, the recumbency, the spectation-pillows, every shelf and seat — and Hal, lying in his "tight little sarcophagus of space," feels not diminished but improved by joining it: denser, more solidly composed, "impossible to knock down." It's the theme's terminal image approached from the inside and experienced as relief. The upright, vertical, agential self (the tennis player, the runner) is exhausting; the horizontal viewing-body is safe, settled, unknockdownable. That the comfort is indistinguishable from a sarcophagus is the point — the pleasure-death posture feels, from within, like finally lying down where you belong.