Gately's fever-memories, the buried-head dream

Pamela Hoffman-Jeep is passivity incarnate, the spectator-condition given a body. She never once gets "from one spot to another under her own power," lives "passed out and sleeping," a "sexual papoose" who must be carried and laid down and picked up, and she makes "passivity and unconsciousness look kind of beautiful" — which is exactly why Fackelmann calls her "Death's Poster-Child." She is what the theme keeps abstracting into a posture, made flesh: the human being reduced to pure reception, horizontal, unconscious, requiring only to be borne about and set down, beautiful in her total surrender of agency. The Entertainment wants to turn everyone into her; she is the end-state without the cartridge, passivity so complete it has become a kind of permanent swoon. That Gately finds her beautiful is the appetite recognizing its object.