Joelle's last walk — "the absolute end of her life…"

Even her own dying is experienced as a screening. Walking to her death, Joelle watches "the absolute end of her life and beauty" run past like an old 16mm reel, projected on a white screen "on her side" — the veiled woman who reads faces as film now sees her whole biography as entertainment, hand-held and stuttering, Uncle Bud to Orin to Jim to the last wet walk. The self has become fully spectator to itself, life converted into a cartridge playing behind the eyes. It's the passivity pole rendered gently and terribly: not watching a screen but having become one, the person and the projection collapsed.