anhedonia and It

The community's misreading of the ghost-father's death, and what the misreading reveals. The younger E.T.A.s explain JOI's microwave suicide as ordinary anhedonia, the midlife crisis of the goal-oriented man who achieved everything and found it empty — and the narrator flatly rejects it: "this is in fact not what killed Incandenza at all." The wrong reading, the book says, tells you more about the students than about Hal and Orin's father; still worshipping the competitive carrot, they project their own bogey onto a death they can't actually see into. The dead father's end stays genuinely unread, misinterpreted by the very institution he founded, his real reasons opaque to everyone — the Hamlet condition of a father-death whose meaning the survivors get wrong, each according to their own need.