Hal horizontal in V.R.5 (ii)
It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. […] That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning.
Context
Flat on the Viewing Room floor in the grip of a panic-attack, Hal delivers the book's most direct piece of Hamlet exegesis, and it is exactly the reading the novel is built to test. What strikes him as preposterous is that the prince, who doubts everything, never doubts the one thing a modern mind would — the ghost — and never asks whether his performed madness might have quietly become real: "whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning." The line lands the theme's central instrument. Hal is the paralyzed prince here in every particular — horizontal, unable to rise, unable to decide anything — reading his own condition back through the play, and the phrase "feigning feigning" is the whole diagnosis of a boy whose composure has become indistinguishable from collapse.