Hal horizontal in Viewing Room 5 — "We are all dying to give…"

This is the theme's master statement, and the novel delivers it with Hal flat on his back on a Viewing Room floor. The will to give oneself away, "utterly," is prior to and larger than any object it fastens on — God or grammar, needles or another person — so that the Entertainment isn't an aberration but the purest available answer to a universal want, the want to be relieved of the self by plunging into something. "A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into" names the double motion the whole book anatomizes: every devotion is an escape, every giving-away a hiding, and the lethal cartridge simply offers the most complete version of the surrender everyone is already dying to make. That it's spoken from the horizontal, among the recliners and spectation-pillows, sites the insight exactly where it belongs.