Gately and the wraith — "Something the boy would love enough…"
Something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out—even if it was only to ask for more. […] The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain.
Context
The purpose reduces, finally, to a verb the culture treats as trivial: to entertain. The wraith wanted only to make something so beloved it would induce the muted watcher to open his mouth "even if it was only to ask for more" — and that clause is the whole lethal loop in embryo, because "ask for more" is exactly what the Entertainment's victims do, crying at the rewinder, buying the ninth finger's viewing as eagerly as the second. The wish to entertain and the mechanism of addiction are revealed as the same gesture: the maker's deepest, most serious wish, dismissed by every scholar and Foundation as low or commercial, is the wish that produces the deadliest object in the world. To entertain totally is to make someone want only more, forever, which is to kill them. The theme's argument has no cleaner statement than this.