Hal, Mario, Coyle; the Weston memories (pp. 954–955)

The paralyzed-prince frame, made explicit. Hal, horizontal, discovers he would "on the whole have preferred not to play," and spins out a fantasy of contriving a fall to ruin his ankle and be knocked from the game "while still on the ascendant" — self-crippling as the only exit from an inheritance he can't refuse outright. What stops the thought is telling: he "couldn't stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to parse out whose disappointment I was willing to cripple myself to avoid," and cannot "imagine Himself's response to my refusal to play, if any." The son is frozen under the regard of a father who is dead and whose judgment he therefore cannot even picture — Hamlet's inaction relocated to the space where the ghost's expectation should be and isn't. The paralysis is total precisely because the authority it answers to has vanished.