the Nuck fight: he does not want to fight them
He says twice very distinctly that he does not want to fight them. He’s no longer divided enough to think about whether this is true.
Context
The theme's purest single-entendre utterance. Gately states the plain fact — "he does not want to fight them" — twice, "very distinctly," and the narration's gloss is the whole point: "He's no longer divided enough to think about whether this is true." Ordinary consciousness, the ironizing self-aware kind, is exactly the faculty that would put quotation-marks around a statement, would monitor it for pose or effect or truth-value. Under the collapse of the fight, that dividedness drops away and the sentence becomes simply true — spoken from below the level where irony operates. It's the book's model of sincerity as a different physics (cf. Mario in 155): not a claim Gately is making about himself but a fact he has stopped being separate enough from to doubt. Single-entendre truth is defined here as speech no longer split from itself.