JOI’s father’s garage monologue

The ghost-father apparatus, prophesied a generation before it takes. The dying grandfather — ruined knees, "under the Influence," anticipating his own death — tells young Jim that where his own father was merely "environmental," a presence one could imagine gone, he himself will be an absence the son "cannot imagine": too present to be subtracted, a father who will haunt precisely by having filled the world. It is the structural seed of the whole Incandenza Hamlet: the father who becomes, in death, an unimaginable-absence, a ghost defined by the impossibility of his not being there. Spoken here to Jim, who will grow into exactly such a father to Hal — the dead man whose head must be dug up, whose umbrella still hangs in the foyer. The apparatus is prophesied by the generation that first built it. (The father-to-son address here also carries dyad freight that fathers-sons handles; taken here for the ghost-structure it names.)