Gately in the Trauma Wing

The scene pins the Hamlet gravedigger scene to Gately with a single Latin slip. Tiny Ewell, narrating his own buried childhood embezzlement, glances off Gately's near-fatal brawl as a "display of reluctant se offendendo" — and the endnote flags the phrase as a blunder for the legal se defendendo, "or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet—namely V.i. 9." That's the gravedigger's own malapropism over Ophelia's grave: the exact V.i register that the anthology's Yorick tableau (003, Hal-as-Hamlet, Gately the digger) and 162's whole ghost-father visitation key to. The novel keeps seeding its Hamlet scaffolding at the level of a single misused word — the graveyard scene surfacing, uninvited, in the sickroom of the man the frame casts as the gravedigger.