the wraith: JOI's fatal irony-allergy

The anthology's diagnosis rendered as cause of death. The wraith (JOI) "never could stand the vapid clichés and disdain for abstraction" of Boston AA — an intellectual's irony-allergy to the banal — and the scene sets it directly against Gately, for whom "'Resentment Is The #1 Offender' is another Boston AA cliché Gately'd started to believe." Same clichés, opposite fates: the man who couldn't stomach the vapidity is dead, the man who swallowed it is (barely) alive. JOI's fatal allergy IS the disdain-for-abstraction the whole theme anatomizes — the sophistication that can't accept a banal truth even to save its own life, the "vapider the cliché" being exactly the thing it most needed and could least stand. (Wraith substance = ghosts-wraiths', built; register = cliché-allergy vs. cliché-belief.)