Stice stuck to the window (Family and Hamlet)

The scene opens on the curved subdorm hall, and Hal's first thought is a half-remembered claim about childhood belief in parental omniscience — that the very young take it as given that a parent's sight bends around corners and follows them past the line of walls. It is stated as a generality about children and parents, not about the Incandenzas, but it surfaces the theme's governing fixation in miniature: the child who assumes he is always seen. In a family run on surveillance-as-love it reads less like a discarded superstition than like the founding condition Hal grew up inside, dropped in unremarked before the scene has named a single family member.