(Companion note: gwch-westward.)

TL;DR

Wallace's 1989 story collection, digested as the prehistory of the E Unibus Pluram program and of Infinite Jest's preoccupations. Two stories are EUP's fiction companions — My Appearance dramatizes the essay's irony-as-armor thesis four years before the essay existed, and Little Expressionless Animals renders entertainment as an industry whose perfected product consumes performer and watcher alike — and the closing novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way is the EUP program itself in fiction (it has its own standalone note: gwch-westward). The collection advances no theories about IJ, so its whole IJ-bearing signal is connective: 37 connections across the ten stories (28 carried in this note, 9 in the Westward note). What they document is the pre-IJ shape of the preoccupations — solipsism inside intimacy, the affect-dead interior, the watched self, the pacifying consumable — that IJ later builds at novel scale.

Key claims

• The collection is the EUP prehistory. My Appearance (1989) dramatizes the Letterman-era thesis DFW argues in E Unibus Pluram (1993) — sincerity made ridiculous, rebellion co-opted and sold back — and both of its irony-mechanism blocks hold at prefiguration on the strength of the spec's designated pairing (E Unibus Pluram names neither My Appearance nor Late Night). Little Expressionless Animals articulates, in industry cant, the fantasy of an entertainment so complete it transcends its content ("some lens, a filter for that great unorganized force") and stages the viewer dissolved "inside the set" — its two strongest blocks also hold at prefiguration. Westward completes the trio; see its note.
• Communication/solipsism is the densest cross-corpus thread: six stories (Luckily, Everything Is Green, Here and There, Say Never, Lyndon, plus Westward) carry it, all honestly held at shared-preoccupation — the shared problem (what, if anything, connects isolated selves) rather than any prefigured IJ scene.
• The affect-dead interior recurs pre-IJ: Girl With Curious Hair's narrator who feels nothing and is read as "so totally happy," Lyndon's responsibility-as-numbness, and (in the standalone note) Mark Nechtr's denied access to his own emotions — early sightings of the anhedonia material IJ builds around Kate Gompert and Hal.
• A recovery idiom carries over from real-world AA: Here and There's "to do a geographic" reaches for the real-world AA "Geographical Cure" — the teaching that flight fails because the self travels with you — literalized a novel-and-a-half early. IJ's recovery material dramatizes that same failure-logic, though the novel never uses the phrase itself.
• Entertainment-as-pacifier appears in miniature twice: John Billy's bootleg whiskey that keeps a population "glazed and politically inactive" (the AFR's logic for the Entertainment, in farce register) and Girl's taped commercial watched compulsively and repeatedly (the Entertainment-object in miniature — pointedly an advertisement). Both weighted shared-preoccupation, not device-level.
• Figurant sightings: LEA's expressionless faces ("configurations of blankness") and Lyndon's David Boyd, the audience "just barely there" — both now anchored by the audit to the wraith's figurant monologue (scene 162, p827–845, esp. p834–835).
• A voice-possession sighting for the archive's ghost record: John Billy's Chuck Nunn speaking through Simple Ranger's mouth (audit-added; a sighting, not evidence bearing on wraith-reality).
• The line-vs-curve/annular motif is corpus-wide (Girl's Jarrett line-vs-circle, Lyndon's reclaiming curve, John Billy's "Under Dirt's curve", Westward's spin-watching) — uniformly weighted as a shared preoccupation throughout.
• Zero THEORY blocks across all ten stories — the honest call: fiction advances no interpretive claim about an IJ crux; the eup-connection signal is correctly carried in CONNECTION blocks.

Theories & evidence

None — the source genuinely advances no theory about IJ (zero THEORY blocks across the collection). The fiction's IJ signal is carried in the per-story CONNECTION blocks below.

---

The stories

Story order is the collection's own. Westward (story 10) lives in its standalone note.

1. Little Expressionless Animals

Capsule (factual)

A collage-structured story built from short numbered-feeling fragments that jump across 1970–1988, most of them set inside the "JEOPARDY!" production machine at Merv Griffin Enterprises. Julie Smith, 20, is an unbeatable champion who has held the title through 700-plus slots; Faye Goddard, 26, is the show's Category/Question researcher and Julie's lover. Faye's mother Dee Goddard is the show's production executive and a functioning alcoholic; the director, Janet Lerner Goddard, is the wife of Dee's ex-husband, a source of ongoing office cruelty. Alex Trebek (rendered as an anxious, self-absorbed host in therapy), Merv Griffin and his interchangeable "shiny man" round out the industry cast. The plot spine: MGE's rules cap a champion at five wins, but Julie is too lucrative to retire, so the rules go "out the window" (p217) and she stays "till she's bumped" (p218). The executives then engineer her defeat by locating her institutionalized autistic brother Lunt / P. Craig Lunt — a savant who has the entire LaPlace's Data Guide memorized — and sneaking him onto a board "just crawling with animal questions" (p175) through a rigged audition, animals being Julie's one blind spot. (The brother's hospitalization was Julie's own selfless doing, paid from her prize money, not part of the executives' scheme.) Interleaved: the siblings' childhood abandonment (two small children left "touching wood" at a fencepost by a highway while their mother drives off, p2/p374); Faye and Julie's intimacy on a nude beach and at Faye's glass-walled apartment; Julie's free-associative "made-up reasons for being a lesbian" monologues; and the title motif — animals' and men's faces as expressionless surfaces.

Register: cool, ironic, fragmented collage; TV-industry satire (clipped executive-speak, Variety headlines as section breaks) alternating with lyric tenderness (the beach scenes) and clinical free-association (Trebek's analysis sessions, Julie's mask monologues). Third-person, present-tense-leaning, camera-like.

Key figures: Faye Goddard, Julie Smith, Dee Goddard, Janet Goddard, Alex Trebek, Merv Griffin & his "shiny man," Muffy deMott, Lunt.

CONNECTION: the perfect performer as a "lens / filter" for an unorganized force — entertainment perfected into pure consuming mystery

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: quote Merv Griffin on Julie: "She's like some lens, a filter for that great unorganized force that some in the industry have spent their whole lives trying to locate and focus" — and his man's gloss, that she can "become, the game show incarnate. She is mystery," her gift being "the capacity of facts to transcend their internal factual limitations and become, in and of themselves, meaning, feeling." [little-expressionless-animals:p212]–[:p214] [e-text]
• IJ echo: JOI's Entertainment as the limit-case of exactly this — an entertainment refined until it becomes a "great unorganized force" that focuses the viewer to the exclusion of all else; the industry's decades-long search for the thing that "kicks facts in the ass" prefigures the samizdat's absolute hold. See the cartridge's introduction, scene 029 (p87–92), and Rodney Tine on its testing/subject matter, scene 107 (p548–549).
• Weight: prefiguration
• Notes: This is the batch's clearest EUP-companion beat: the executives articulate, in industry cant, the fantasy of an entertainment so complete it transcends its own content — the thesis the Entertainment literalizes. Griffin's "What is that force?" (p212) is asked in earnest.

CONNECTION: the viewer consumed — the person "inside the set," entertainment that drives its captive audience mad

• Crux: entertainment-lethality
• Early text: quote Muffy deMott on "lonely or somehow disturbed people who've had only the TV all their lives... it becomes in a way their whole way of defining themselves as existents... that they're outside the set, and everything else is inside the set," who, once they glimpse themselves inside the set — "sometimes you hear about how it drives them mad, sometimes." [little-expressionless-animals:p289]–[:p291] [e-text] **
• IJ echo: the Entertainment's lethality — the viewer who cannot stop watching and dissolves into the screen. The Medical Attaché watching himself into catatonia, scenes 007/025/028 (p33–37, 78–79, 87); Marathe & Steeply on "losing people to the Entertainment," scene 101 (p507–508).
• Weight: prefiguration
• Notes: deMott raises her own counter-thought — Dee's confidence that she is safely "on the outside of the set" is immediately undercut ("you never lie there awake in the dark considering the possibility that it's the other way around," p286) — the inside/outside boundary is already staged as porous, which is exactly the boundary the Entertainment erases.

CONNECTION: the too-beautiful watched woman and the mask with no finger-holes

• Crux: joelle-veil
• Early text: quote Julie on-camera radiates "a sort of oneness with the board's data... The camera lingers on her. It seems to ogle" [:p157]; Julie's theory of love as trying "to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask" [:p306], later inverted — "there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men" [:p382]; and the postcard punchline "Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful" [:p319]. [e-text]
• IJ echo: Joelle van Dyne / the P.G.O.A.T. — the woman whose face is the thing watched (the Entertainment's rumored lens on the maternal/beautiful face) and hidden behind the U.H.I.D. veil; the "too beautiful vs. deformed" undecidability. Molly Notkin on Joelle's role in the Entertainment, scene 159 (p787–795); Gately and Joelle on the veil/her past, scene 104 (p531–538).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Kept below prefiguration deliberately: the mask/veil and the ogled-beautiful-face are shared DFW preoccupations here, not a one-to-one setup of Joelle's plot. The "mask with holes for fingers" figure is the load-bearing verbal link.

CONNECTION: the damaged, institutionalized savant sibling carried "like a suitcase"

• Crux: none
• Early text: quote Lunt is autistic, "a mannequin of a kid instead of a kid," with "the whole LaPlace's Data Guide memorized"; the sister "used to carry him around like a suitcase" [:p177], and he "still hides his head under his arm whenever things get tense" [:p178]. [e-text]
• IJ echo: Mario Incandenza — the loving, developmentally/physically different sibling around whom the family organizes its care; and the family-care-for-the-damaged theme. Mario's birth and defects, scene 071 (p312–317); the Hal/Mario tenderness, scene 010 (p39–42).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Honest downgrade: Lunt is an autistic data-savant weaponized by the industry, Mario a gentle non-savant; the shared material is the disabled brother as the sibling's moral center and "job," not the clinical particulars. The savant-worked-as-a-buzzer figure is closer to IJ's figurant preoccupation (next block) than to Mario.

CONNECTION: expressionless faces — "configurations of blankness," the animal/human face as a surface with nothing behind it

• Crux: figurant-design
• Early text: quote Julie: "you cannot stand animals, because animals' faces have no expression. Not even the possibility of it" [:p378]; and of men, "men's faces never stop moving—they're like antennae. But all the faces do is move through different configurations of blankness" [:p380]. [e-text]
• IJ echo: JOI's figurants — background human beings filmed as pure moving scenery, mouths working but expressing nothing — and the wider anhedonia/blank-affect thread (Hal's inability to externalize what is inside him). Hal watching JOI's filmography, scenes 132/138/140 (p686–689, 701–706, 711–714).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: IJ-locator flag: the figurant concept is defined chiefly in JOI's filmography (endnote 24), which has no clean scene number in scenes-catalog.tsv; the scenes cited are Hal's film-watching sessions where the films (and their blank background figures) are on screen. Treated as shared-preoccupation, not prefiguration — the title's "expressionless animals" and the figurant idea rhyme thematically rather than genealogically. **

CONNECTION: violation in the dark of the theater — entertainment absorbs the watchers while harm happens in the next seat

• Crux: none
• Early text: quote the 1970 movie-theater fragment: "A cartoon has begun. The child's eyes enter the cartoon." while beside her "the woman's eyes are bright with fear. She sits absolutely still. The man plays with her red hair." [:p3]; Faye's later retelling of the same event: "a man in the theater behind you was playing with your mother's hair all through the movie. He was touching her hair in a sexual way. She was horrified and repulsed, but didn't make a sound, the whole time, I guess for fear that you, the child, would discover that a strange man in the dark was touching your mother in a sexual way." — and the damage chain that follows: "She spends a year on antidepressants. Then she drinks." [:p351] [e-text]
• IJ echo: absorption in entertainment rendering adjacent human suffering invisible — the room that fills, one bystander at a time, with people captured by the Entertainment while no one helps anyone (scene 028, p87; scene 025, p78–79); and the spectation-as-violation underside of the watched-woman material (cf. this story's ogling-camera block above).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: A later addition, easy to miss: this is the story's watched-woman/violence-of-spectation core. The theater violation is the origin of the family damage — the text's own chain runs violation-during-the-show → the mother's breakdown and drinking [:p351]–[:p352] → the fencepost abandonment (p2/p374). Entertainment is not backdrop here but the enabling condition: the cartoon holds every eye while a woman is used in the dark. Held at shared-preoccupation — the rhyme with IJ's absorbed-and-helpless viewers is thematic, not a plot seed.

2. Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR

Capsule (factual)

A very short, single-situation story told in dense, Latinate, sustained-sentence prose. Two men work late in a corporate Building and leave at the same hour: a recently divorced junior Account Representative and the married, grandfatherly Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production. They descend to the empty Executive Garage (the Account Rep to his white motor scooter, the VP to a black Brougham). As they cross the space toward the conversational obligation of two near-strangers, the VP suffers a heart attack and collapses. The Account Representative — who learned CPR from the Red Cross instructor he later married — straddles and works the stricken man, administering CPR and calling "Help" into a garage so acoustically sealed that almost no sound escapes to the street above, where two oblivious lovers pass. The story ends mid-effort, the Account Rep keeping the VP "minimally alive... pending the arrival of help," help that never audibly comes. No proper names; characters are their titles.

Register: hyper-formal, abstract, comic-existential; long periodic sentences, corporate depersonalization (title-as-name), mock-solemn diction ("the decapitation of his cycle"). Third person, close on the Account Representative.

Key figures: the Account Representative; the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production.

CONNECTION: the institution that contains and dwarfs the person — the Building that owns its occupants, not the reverse

• Crux: none
• Early text: quote the after-hours Building's silence takes on expression, and the executive "Realizes that the Building not only took up but organized space; contained the executive and not vice versa... not, after all, comprised of or by executives. Or staff" — with "the very issue of the Building's ownership" left "hung in air, unsettled." [luckily-the-account-representative-knew-cpr:p3]–[:p4] [e-text]
• IJ echo: IJ's corporate/systemic satire and its immanence preoccupation — the ONAN/InterLace apparatus and O.N.A.N. bureaucracy as structures that contain and outlast the individuals inside them; the possession figure recurs at the story's end, the dying man's life "now literally the junior executive's, to have and to hold" [:p19]. Nearest IJ register: the entertainment-corporate machinery framing the Marathe/Steeply debate on what a system is for, scene 029 (p87–92).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Weak / DFW-wide flag. This is a broad Wallace preoccupation (the person as a term inside a larger system) rather than an IJ-specific prefiguration; recorded, not inflated. No confident single-scene IJ locator — the echo is diffuse across IJ's ONAN apparatus, so the cite is offered as the closest available rather than a pinpoint.

CONNECTION: two people who share pain unknowingly — connection failing except through emergency, the unheard cry for help

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Early text: quote of the two men facing "the obligation of conversation without the conversational prerequisites of intimacy or interests or concerns to share": "They shared pain, though of course neither knew" [:p10]; the whole climax is a cry — "'Help,' the Account Representative continued to call" [:p20] — that the sealed garage prevents anyone from hearing, while "two lovers walked... hearing always no real difference in the city's constant distant nighttime traffic's hiss and sigh" [:p18]. **
• IJ echo: IJ's communication-and-solipsism spine — adjacent human beings unable to reach one another's interiors; suffering that goes unheard. Nearest IJ material: the anhedonia/isolation cluster around Kate Gompert and the depressive interior, scene 135 (p692–698); the professional-conversationalist scene where father and son cannot actually converse, scene 005 (p27–31).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: The strongest genuine IJ link in this story: two men in enforced proximity who "share pain" but cannot connect, and a literal call for help that physics (and inattention) render inaudible — the solipsism theme in miniature. Still short of prefiguration; it is thematic kinship, not a plot seed.

3. Girl With Curious Hair

Capsule

First-person monologue narrated by "Sick Puppy" (a name given him by his punkrocker friends; his real name is withheld), a handsome, wealthy young corporate-liability attorney from a Marine-aristocracy family — his father is a senior Marine officer, his brother carries the President's nuclear "Black Box" [girl-with-curious-hair:p19]. The frame is a Keith Jarrett piano concert at the Irvine Concert Hall, which Sick Puppy attends with LA punkrockers Gimlet, Big, Mr. Wonderful, and (met in line) Grope and Cheese. Interleaved with the concert are flashbacks: how he met the punks at a Young Republicans party (where he set a Young Democrat's beard on fire), and childhood memories. The register is flat, cheerful, euphemistic, and morally inverted: Sick Puppy narrates atrocity (burning people, setting a gasoline-soaked puppy on fire, professional perjury on behalf of manufacturers whose products maim consumers, a childhood incident of raping his sister for which his father burned his penis, and a settled plan to murder his father) in the same brand-conscious, upbeat idiom he uses for cologne and hairstyling. Two engines drive the story: he cannot be affected by drugs or feel ordinary emotion, and he is sexually functional only when fellated and only if permitted to burn the partner. The punk Cheese, on LSD, keeps pressing him on why he is "so totally happy," a question that eventually drops the narrator into a slowed, dissociated state as the story breaks off mid-scene ("And here's what I did.") [girl-with-curious-hair:p42]. Key figures: Sick Puppy (narrator), Gimlet/Sandy Imblum, Cheese, the burn/immolation motif, the taped English Leather commercial.

CONNECTION: A narrator who feels nothing and names the void "happiness" — anhedonia in first person

• Crux: none
• Early text: "LSD and other controlled substances unfortunately do not affect me or my state of normal consciousness. I cannot become high from ingesting drugs" [girl-with-curious-hair:p11]; the punk Cheese, unable to place it, tells him "There is something about you that is so totally happy, Sick Puppy" and keeps asking "I wish to know why you are so happy" [girl-with-curious-hair:p36].
• IJ echo: The novel's anhedonia/affectlessness thread — the clinical account of anhedonia and psychotic depression built around Kate Gompert and refracted through Hal (scene 135, pp. 692–698); the numbed inability to feel that IJ treats as the endpoint of the culture's pleasure-seeking.
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Direction differs and should not be overstated. Sick Puppy is a cheerful psychopath, not a depressive; IJ's anhedonia is suffered, his is unfelt. The shared preoccupation is DFW's recurring figure of the affect-dead interior mistaken (by the self or by others) for wellness — the same nerve IJ presses when Hal's felt interior and blank exterior come apart. Recorded as preoccupation, not as a prefigured scene.

CONNECTION: A recorded TV commercial watched compulsively, to the exclusion of a real partner — the Entertainment-object in miniature

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: "I have the English Leather Cologne commercial taped on my new Toshiba VCR and I enjoy reclining in my horsehair recliner and masturbating while the commercial plays repeatedly on my VCR." [girl-with-curious-hair:p4]
• IJ echo: The Entertainment as a recorded cartridge watched compulsively and repeatedly to the exclusion of everything else — the Medical Attaché who begins watching and cannot stop (scene 007, pp. 33–37; scene 025, pp. 78–79); more broadly the cartridge-object at the center of the ONAN/AFR plot (scene 029, pp. 87–92).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: A genuine miniature of the Entertainment-as-object — a taped video watched, sexually and compulsively, on repeat — and pointedly it is an advertisement, which ties it to the EUP critique the spec tracks. Downgraded from prefiguration because the commercial is not lethal or will-annihilating and the story is not primarily about entertainment; the resemblance is a preoccupation shared with EUP, not the developed Entertainment device. Girl is not on the spec's high-density entertainment list and the block is weighted accordingly.

4. Lyndon

Capsule

A fictionalized life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, narrated by David Boyd, a young man who is hired in the 1950s as a mailboy in Senator Johnson's Dirksen Building office and rises over roughly a decade to executive assistant, stenographer, and speechwriter, staying at Johnson's side through the Senate, the Vice Presidency, the Kennedy assassination (seen from inside the motorcade and Parkland), the Presidency, and Johnson's death. The text alternates Boyd's continuous first-person narrative with pseudo-documentary epigraphs — italic pull-quotes attributed to LBJ speeches, staff, and an invented oral-history volume, Dissecting a President: Conversations with LBJ's Inner Circle — a collage/documentary form. Boyd is homosexual (an affair at Yale with a depressive named Jeffrey ends in Jeffrey's suicide and Boyd's expulsion); he enters a marriage of convenience to Margaret Childs, whose powerful father places him in Johnson's office, and later builds a life with a Haitian partner, René Duverger, whom he eventually marries and who dies slowly of an unnameable "pattern" of infections (a clear AIDS allegory, published 1989). The register is elegiac and controlled against LBJ's crude, grandiose, tender bombast. The philosophical climax comes in two movements: LBJ's late-night claim that right and wrong are "feelings... not words" and that responsibility "is not even like a feeling... it's like the sky" [lyndon:p301], [lyndon:p314], [lyndon:p317]; and Lady Bird's tea with Boyd, where she relays LBJ's doctrine that love is "arrangements of distance" [lyndon:p381] and "a federal highway" [lyndon:p383]. The story ends with Boyd finding the dying President and the dying Duverger together in bed, LBJ whispering "Hello up there" [lyndon:p403] — an inversion of the campaign helicopter's "Hello down there" [lyndon:p2]. Key figures: David Boyd (narrator), LBJ, Lady Bird, René Duverger, the documentary epigraphs.

CONNECTION: Love, right/wrong, and responsibility recast as "distance" — the communication-solipsism spine in embryo

• Crux: none
• Early text: LBJ on the protesters: "To them, right and wrong is words, boy." then "Right and wrong ain't words," he said. "They're feelings. In your guts and intestines and such. Not words." [lyndon:p301]; and Lady Bird relaying his doctrine: "That love, he will say, is a federal highway, lines putting communities, that move and exist at great distance, in touch." [lyndon:p383], glossed earlier as "Love is simply a word. It joins separate things." [lyndon:p381].
• IJ echo: The novel's central preoccupation with what, if anything, connects isolated selves across distance — dramatized in the Marathe/Steeply debates about love and what one chooses to die for (scene 035, pp. 105–109; scene 088, pp. 418–430), and structurally in JOI's making of the Entertainment as a doomed attempt to reach his son across an unbridgeable interpersonal distance.
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: This is the clearest thematic tie in the batch. LBJ's "distance" doctrine, and the story's worry that "love" may be "simply a word" that only "joins separate things," is the communication/solipsism problem IJ inherits and enlarges. Recorded as preoccupation rather than prefiguration because no specific IJ scene is anticipated; the shared question is.

CONNECTION: The line that curves back into a circle — IJ's annular geometry prefigured

• Crux: annular-structure
• Early text: "Forget the curved circle, for whom distance means the sheer size of what it holds inside. Build a road. Make a line." — and the line, driven west, is reclaimed by the planet's curve: "the giant curve that informs straight lines will bring you around, in time, to the distant eastern point of the country behind you" [lyndon:p400].
• IJ echo: IJ's annular / Sierpinski-gasket organizing structure — the novel's design of recursion and return, in which the apparently linear narrative curves back on itself (the whole-book structural reading; no single scene).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: IJ locator is deliberately diffuse — annularity is a whole-book structural property, not a scene, so no scene number is cited (per the plan's "say so rather than invent" rule). The straight-line-that-the-curve-reclaims figure is a documented DFW structural signature; here it is stated almost as a thesis, and it recurs across this batch (the Jarrett line-vs-circle at [girl-with-curious-hair:p28] and John Billy's "Under Dirt's curve" at [john-billy:p107]). Held at shared-preoccupation rather than prefiguration: no genealogical attestation ties this passage to IJ's annular design, and the prefigured object as claimed — "the geometric imagination" — is a figure, not a device, condition, or scene.

CONNECTION: The self-erasing aide who exists only as another man's audience — the figurant

• Crux: none
• Early text: staff voices in the oral history: "A lot of times Dave could be in a room with you and you'd never even notice him in the room." [lyndon:p156]; "Almost refined right out of existence, somehow." [lyndon:p157]; and the summary hypothesis, "Johnson needed an audience, and Boyd was an audience that Johnson knew was just barely there? That he didn't ever even have to acknowledge or feel any responsibility to?" [lyndon:p160].
• IJ echo: The figurant preoccupation — the person who is present only as background/audience, never a foreground self; Hal's dread of being a figurant and the entertainment/spectatorship axis of ETA and the JOI films.
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: IJ locator uncertain and left uncited: the "figurant" idea is diffuse across Hal's interior scenes and the JOI-film discussions and I will not pin it to a scene I cannot verify (per plan rule). ** Boyd as an audience "just barely there," valued precisely because he demands nothing back, is the same nerve IJ works — the human reduced to spectator. Note the story itself supplies the counter-reading in the oral-history voices, who disagree about whether the Boyd/LBJ bond was love, worship, or use ([lyndon:p142]–[lyndon:p170]); recorded per cite-as-written.

5. John Billy

Capsule

A grotesque comic tall-tale in heavily stylized Oklahoma dialect, narrated by John Billy (who names himself only at the end) to "Simple Ranger," a half-mad old ex-WPA dust-watcher, in the Outside Minogue Bar. The subject is Chuck Nunn Junior, the town's semi-divine golden boy — football hero, war legend, oil-lucky sheep rancher, lover of the beautiful Glory Joy duBoise. Nunn's undoing runs in stages: the malignant sheep-mogul T. Rex Minogue has his brother V.V. dynamite Nunn's flock ("the day it rained sheep"); Nunn, enraged, drives to take revenge and collides head-on with the drunk V.V., a crash that busts his eyes and concusses him into a six-day "moral coma." He heals, but two lasting injuries remain: his temper/moral sense is now "insecure" and drops him into blank white rages, and his laser-repaired eyes are left too small and literally fall out of his head when he sneezes. When he sneezes his eyes into his cereal one morning, he flees for good to wreak vengeance on the Minogues. The story's second half is set in the bar as T. Rex — wheelchaired, cancer-ridden, throat-vibrator, buzzard on his shoulder — arrives and recounts how he survived: he dangled the eye-loosed Nunn out a window so Nunn could "see straight down into everything there is," a cosmic/agricultural revelation that apparently unmade Nunn's vengeance. Simple Ranger progressively becomes inhabited by Chuck Nunn Junior's voice; buzzards mass on the bar; the whole company levitates, drinks T. Rex's whiskey, and falls into a shared dream. Register: hyperbolic, apocalyptic-folkloric, Faulknerian pastiche played for grotesque comedy. Key figures: John Billy (narrator), Chuck Nunn Junior, T. Rex Minogue, Glory Joy, Simple Ranger.

CONNECTION: A consumable that keeps a population "glazed and apolitical" — the Entertainment as pacifying weapon, rhymed

• Crux: entertainment-lethality
• Early text: T. Rex's bootleg product is "the illegal and chemically unstable sweet-potato whiskey that kept our neighboring reservation's Native Americans glazed and politically inactive" [john-billy:p14]; by the close the whole company, drinking it, "got glazed and apolitical, also torpid, docile, our minds in a deep loose neutral gear" [john-billy:p134].
• IJ echo: The Entertainment as a consumable that renders its audience inert, will-less, and finally incapable of anything else — the Medical Attaché watched to catatonia (scene 007, pp. 33–37; scene 025, pp. 78–79) — and its explicit weaponization as a tool against a pleasure-seeking populace in the Marathe/Steeply debate (scene 072, pp. 317–321; scene 103, pp. 528–530).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: The one earned IJ wire in John Billy. The specific idea — a substance deliberately used to keep a population "glazed and politically inactive," i.e. an intoxicant as an instrument of political pacification — is exactly the logic the AFR attributes to the Entertainment. Downgraded from prefiguration because the vehicle is a comic bootleg liquor, not a media object, and the depoliticization is played for grotesque farce rather than dramatized as lethal; the resemblance is a shared preoccupation with pacification-by-consumption, not the developed device.

CONNECTION: A moral sense "knocked loose" — right and wrong "smithered to chaotic"

• Crux: none
• Early text: after the crash Nunn suffers days in which his "sense of right and wrong and love and hate smithered to chaotic" [john-billy:p30], thereafter dropping without warning into "blank white mindless rage" [john-billy:p70].
• IJ echo: IJ's recurring interest in the sudden evacuation of moral/affective sense (the blankness behind violence, the discontinuity of the self) — diffuse, not scene-specific.
• Weight: verbal-echo
• Notes: Lowest weight; recorded chiefly because it is a near-verbatim cross-echo of Lyndon's "right and wrong ain't words... they're feelings" ([lyndon:p301]) — the two stories in this batch share the figure of a moral sense that is a felt, losable interior state rather than a set of words. IJ side is a preoccupation only; no scene cited because none is verifiably anticipated.

CONNECTION: The absent man's voice speaking through a living mouth — possession as tall-tale device

• Crux: none
• Early text: as T. Rex talks, Simple Ranger begins answering in a voice not his own: "'What I see,' whispered the big sharp clear new Ranger in a smooth new clear young voice" [john-billy:p83]; the Ranger then delivers Nunn's window-revelation in Nunn's own first person — "My eyes are free of my head... I am able to see directly below my dangling self" [john-billy:p115]; Glory Joy names it flat: "That voice there, John Billy, that voice there is Chuck Junior's voice," [john-billy:p117].
• IJ echo: the wraith's mechanics at Gately's hospital bed — a dead man's words arriving through a living man's own brain-voice, in vocabulary he cannot own (scene 162, pp. 827–845, the wraith-physics passage per the scene file); more broadly IJ's ghosts-wraiths material (the wraith's use of Ortho Stice; the possession register generally).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: A later addition: the story shows Simple Ranger "progressively becom[ing] inhabited by Chuck Nunn Junior's voice" — and with the wraith material weighed in the archive's ghost record, a GWCH sighting of voice-possession is worth recording. Register disanalogy stated honestly: John Billy's possession is farcical-folkloric (Nunn may not even be dead — "Nunn never got seen no more," [john-billy:p63]), IJ's wraith is a worked-out metaphysics; the shared preoccupation is the migrating voice — another self speaking through a person's mouth/mind — not a plot seed. Crux left none; this is a sighting for the wraith-reality question, not evidence bearing on it.

6. Here and There

Capsule (factual)

Dedicated "For K. Gödel." A fractured, two-voice story with no quotation attributions: the paragraphs alternate between Bruce — a 22-year-old MIT electrical-engineering graduate from Bloomington, Indiana, "the first really great poet of technology" [:p35] — and his unnamed ex-girlfriend, an Indiana University graduate student, each narrating the collapse of their three-year relationship in mutually incompatible accounts. Braided through the pair's monologues is a third, un-italicized-but-set-apart voice in double quotes: a "fiction therapy" interlocutor who addresses Bruce by name, glosses the proceedings as a constructed therapeutic text, and presses him toward emotional honesty. The plot: the girl's "feelings changed" (she met someone in Stats); Bruce, gutted, "do[es] a geographic" [:p24], driving his mother's car up I-95 to his aunt and uncle's house in Prosopopeia, Maine, near the Canadian border. There, the uncle (emphysemic insurance adjuster) and aunt (third-grade teacher studying French) tend him; Bruce deteriorates (insomnia, drawn-up testicles, cotton in the ear, fear), and the story climaxes with him unable to repair the aunt's ancient electric stove — he strips and disorders the wires past reassembly, panics, and, asked by the therapy-voice "What are you afraid of," answers that he is "afraid of absolutely everything there is" [:p95]; the voice replies "Then welcome" [:p96]. Bruce's aesthetic creed runs throughout: words as "correlative signifiers" are withering [:p37], to be replaced by "Gödel numbers, context-free grammars, finite automata" [:p40], meaning subjected to "a great cleaning" [:p40].

Register: high-modernist collage; alternating first-person interior monologues in radically different registers (Bruce's ornate, mathematically-figured prose vs. the girl's plain, feeling-led speech), punctuated by the metafictional therapy-voice. Present-tense-leaning, unattributed dialogue.

Key figures: Bruce; the unnamed girlfriend; the "fiction therapy" voice; Bruce's aunt and uncle; brother Leonard (offstage, phone).

CONNECTION: "doing a geographic" — flight to a new place as a failed cure, because the affliction travels with you

• Crux: none
• Early text: quote Bruce's response to the breakup: "I find in myself a need to get very away. To do a geographic." [here-and-there:p24]; and the verdict on the attempt weeks later: "Days go by, and my aunt and uncle are impeccably kind, but Maine becomes another here instead of a there." [here-and-there:p59] [e-text]
• IJ echo: the AA teaching threaded through IJ's recovery material — the "geographical cure" that fails because the addict/sufferer carries the self along; you cannot outrun what is inside you. Nearest digest material: the AA-doctrine cluster around Gately and Joelle's first meeting, scene 074 (p343–367), and Gately on the mechanics of the program, scene 092 (p442–449).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: "To do a geographic" [:p24] reaches for the real-world AA "Geographical Cure" idiom — flight fails because the self travels with you. IJ's recovery material dramatizes that same failure-logic, but the term itself appears nowhere in the novel's text; the AA cluster (scene 074, 092) is cited as the nearest thematic locus, not a verbal source. The story literalizes the teaching a novel-and-a-half early: the whole trip proves the "there" becomes another "here."

CONNECTION: two people narrating incompatible realities — solipsism inside intimacy, and being alone with someone present

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Early text: quote the story's form is the theme: Bruce and the girl never once share an account of the same events. Bruce on her: "As if her feelings were something outside her, not in her control, like a bus she has to wait for." [here-and-there:p13]; the girl's own final diagnosis: "I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad." [here-and-there:p76] [e-text]
• IJ echo: IJ's communication-and-solipsism spine — the impossibility of getting inside another's head, isolation within a relationship, incompatible private worlds narrated side by side. Nearest register: the depressive-interior cluster around Kate Gompert, scene 135 (p692–698); the father/son "professional conversationalist" scene where two people in the same room cannot actually reach each other, scene 005 (p27–31).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Same crux as Luckily / Everything Is Green. The girl's "alone even when there's somebody else there" is the load-bearing line — the private-world problem stated flat. Registered as preoccupation, not a plot prefiguration.

CONNECTION: metafiction critiqued from inside — "fiction therapy" as text-that-knows-it-is-text, subordinating the writer's interests to another's

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: quote the therapy-voice: "fiction therapy in order to be at all effective must locate itself and operate within a strenuously yes some might even say harshly limited defined structured space. It must be confronted as text which is to say fiction which is to say project." [here-and-there:p16]; and the ethical turn — "we decided to construct an instance in which for once your interests are to be subordinated to those of another." [here-and-there:p18] [e-text]
• IJ echo: the anti-metafiction / anti-solipsistic-art program EUP articulates and IJ tries to execute — art that must break out of self-conscious cleverness toward other people; JOI's turn away from "anticonfluential" self-referential film toward something that reaches a viewer (JOI's filmography and found-drama inception, scene 078, p375–376; Hal watching the films, scenes 132/138/140, p686–714).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Real payload is Westward (Batch 4), which is the metafiction-from-inside program at full length; here the beat is a compact early instance. Held at shared-preoccupation: the story dramatizes the problem (fiction that subordinates the writer's ego to another person) rather than prefiguring a specific IJ scene. Author-anchor for the crux: DFW's essay E Unibus Pluram (1993), digested in e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections.

CONNECTION: the abstract prodigy who cannot function in embodied life, ending in total fear

• Crux: none
• Early text: quote Bruce, unable to reassemble a crude stove: "The work that interests me is done with a pencil and a sheet of paper... At the cutting edge of electrical engineering, almost everything interesting is resolvable via the manipulation of variables. I've never once been stumped on an exam. Ever. And I appear to have broken this miserable piece-of-shit stove." [here-and-there:p79]; resolving into "I'm afraid of absolutely everything there is." [here-and-there:p95] — answered "Then welcome." [here-and-there:p96] [e-text]
• IJ echo: the gifted-but-unmoored figure and the pervasive dread/anhedonia thread — the prodigy whose facility (verbal, abstract) coexists with an inability to inhabit ordinary life and feeling; Hal's arc toward paralysis and the wider fear/depression material (Kate Gompert cluster, scene 135, p692–698).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Honest disanalogy: Bruce is hyper-articulate where late-Hal becomes unable to externalize at all — so this is thematic kinship (giftedness estranged from lived feeling), not a one-to-one Hal setup; crux left none. The closing "afraid of absolutely everything... Then welcome" reads as a surrender-as-beginning beat that faintly rhymes with AA's admission-of-powerlessness, noted but not built into a separate block to avoid double-counting the geographic link.

7. My Appearance

Capsule (factual)

The spec's EUP fiction companion. First-person retrospect of Edilyn, a 40-year-old commercial-television actress (a successful police drama, an Emmy nomination, four children, two feature films) recounting her March 22, 1989 guest spot on Late Night with David Letterman. Her second husband Rudy — a public-TV comedy-development executive who left commercial TV — and his former colleague Ron (an NBC executive, "the smallest mouth... more like a gash in his head," [:p55]/[:p242]) spend the story coaching her to survive Letterman, whom Rudy insists "feeds off ridiculousness like some enormous Howdy-Doodyesque parasite" [:p41]. Their doctrine: Letterman's show is an "anti-show" that ridicules all sincerity, so the only defense is to ridicule yourself first, appear knowingly ironic and deadpan, and be "not-sincere" [:p89]; Edilyn is wired with an earplug to take live direction from Rudy and Ron during the taping. Edilyn resists the whole apparatus, insisting she will just be herself. On air she is a hit — she plays the "wiener commercials" question straight and deadpan-comic — but crucially she believes she "wasn't acting" [:p224]; Rudy reads the same performance as her having successfully acted ironic. The story's argument crystallizes in the limousine home: Rudy's claim that "no one is really the way they have to be seen" [:p232] and that television "make[s] it true... By watching him" [:p234]. It ends on Edilyn's realization that this metaphysics would erase her and Rudy too, and on her fatal closing question about "just what way he thought he and I really were" [:p248] — "Which turned out to be the mistake" [:p249].

Register: cool, precise, first-person confessional-ironic; heavy on the recursive self-consciousness of TV-industry talk; interleaves the limousine/office coaching scenes with the on-air Letterman transcript. Xanax-and-cocktails throughout as ambient anxiety.

Key figures: Edilyn (narrator); husband Rudy; Ron; David Letterman (as rendered); Paul Shaffer; Reese (NBC Sports coordinator); Charmian (Ron's wife, offstage adviser).

CONNECTION: irony as armor — "sincerity is out; the joke is now on people who're sincere"

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: quote Ron: "Sincerity is out... The joke is now on people who're sincere." [my-appearance:p61]; the prescription — "Make sure you're seen as making fun of yourself, but in a self-aware and ironic way." [my-appearance:p68]; and its worldview — "Act as if you knew from birth that everything is clichéd and hyped and empty and absurd, and that that's just where the fun is." [my-appearance:p70] [e-text]
• IJ echo: IJ as the attempted execution of EUP's anti-rebel program — the recovery of single-entendre sincerity as the only escape from the irony-cage. The AA sections stake exactly this: banal, sincere clichés that work because they are past irony (Gately/Joelle at the meeting, scene 074, p343–367; Gately on the Higher-Power concept, scene 092, p442–449); Mario as the novel's one un-ironic, sincere figure (Mario's filmic functions, scene 015, p54–55; Mario around ETA, scene 154, p755–769); Hal's inability to be sincere or to externalize what is inside him.
• Weight: prefiguration
• Notes: The batch's clearest EUP-companion beat, and it is author-anchored: DFW's E Unibus Pluram (1993) argues precisely that Letterman-era TV irony makes sincerity ridiculous and disarms rebellion; My Appearance (1989) dramatizes that thesis four years early — the spec's designated pairing. See e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections. Prefiguration (not merely shared-preoccupation) on the strength of the spec's designated pairing; the essay itself draws no explicit link (E Unibus Pluram names neither story).

CONNECTION: the anti-rebel trap — an "anti-show" is still a show, and rebellion gets co-opted and sold back

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: quote Ron: "even if something's an anti-show, if it's a hit, it's a show" [my-appearance:p114]; the SNL parable — the sponsors "turned the anti-commercials' joke around... and were using it, using the joke to manipulate the very same audience the parodies had made fun of them for manipulating in the first place." [my-appearance:p120]; and on Letterman himself, "He's making money ridiculing the exact things that have put him in a position to make money ridiculing things." [my-appearance:p110] [e-text]
• IJ echo: EUP's core diagnosis that you cannot rebel against television via television because commerce absorbs the irony — and IJ's answer in the Entertainment/samizdat, an "anti-entertainment" that is nonetheless the most consuming entertainment of all, inside a totally commodified InterLace culture. Nearest digest material: the cartridge's introduction and the entertainment-as-industry framing, scene 029 (p87–92); the ad-executive scene planning anti-Entertainment ads that themselves become media, scene 168 (p876–883).
• Weight: prefiguration
• Notes: Arguably the single most explicitly-EUP passage in the collection outside Westward: the mechanism of co-optation (rebellion → hit → product) is stated outright. Author-anchor as above. Held at prefiguration on the co-optation mechanism specifically, which IJ's commodified-media world literalizes.

CONNECTION: no authentic self behind the appearance — TV makes "no one is really the way they have to be seen" true by watching

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: quote Rudy: "What put him there, here and now, for you to see, is that he can't be seen. That's what the whole thing's about, now. That no one is really the way they have to be seen." [my-appearance:p232]; and — "Doesn't matter what I think. That's what the show is about. They make it true. By watching him." [my-appearance:p234]; against Edilyn's counter-terror that "if no one is really the way we see them... that would include me. And you." [my-appearance:p244] [e-text]
• IJ echo: entertainment dissolving the authentic self — the watched self with no interior behind the surface (JOI's figurants; the "too-beautiful watched face"), and the horror of a self that exists only when observed. Nearest digest material: Hal watching JOI's films / the blank-background-figures thread, scenes 132/138/140 (p686–714); Joelle as the watched face at the Entertainment's center, scene 159 (p787–795) and scene 178 (p938–941).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Kept below prefiguration deliberately — the IJ echo (self-as-pure-performance, no authentic interior) is thematic and diffuse across the entertainment-self material rather than a one-to-one setup of a single IJ scene. The load-bearing figure is the recursion "they make it true by watching" — appearance manufacturing the reality it claims to report.

CONNECTION: coached sincerity — taking live direction on how to appear authentic ("being not-sincere")

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: quote Edilyn refusing the earplug: "I emphatically did not want to wear a pork-colored earplug and take direction from my husband on not being sincere." — corrected by Rudy, "being not-sincere," and by Ron, "There's a difference," [my-appearance:p88]–[:p90] [e-text] **
• IJ echo: the mediated/scripted self — sincere human contact reduced to a coached performance. Nearest register: the "professional conversationalist" scene, where father-son sincerity is a hired, scripted service (scene 005, p27–31); and the wider ETA/family register in which affect is managed and performed.
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: The "being not-sincere" vs "not being sincere" hair-split is the whole irony-machine in one line: a self so mediated that authenticity itself must be directed. Thematic kinship with IJ's professional-conversationalist premise, not a plot seed — held at shared-preoccupation.

8. Say Never

Capsule (factual)

A story in rotating section-headers — LABOV, MIKEY AND LOUIS, LEN, LENNY — cycling through the same crisis in incompatible voices. Labov, an old retired North-Side Chicago tailor, narrates the frame: his widowed best friend Mrs. (Greta) Tagus sits in his cold kitchen with stomach trouble because her son Lenny Tagus — a Northwestern professor of Weimar German literature — has committed adultery with Carlina Rentaria-Cruz, the former girlfriend of Lenny's younger brother Mikey, and has announced it in a pompous Xeroxed "open letter" Express-Mailed "to all friends and family" [:p64]. The MIKEY AND LOUIS sections give Mikey's aggrieved barroom talk (dumped by Carlina, wanting to hit someone). The LEN/LENNY sections give Lenny's own hyper-articulate, self-lacerating interior — the letter's mock-legal prose ("the explanation of any transgression inevitably metastasizes into excuse," [:p70]), his self-diagnosis under the men's-room graffiti "no more mr. nice guy" [:p116], and his phone call with his mother during which Bonnie (his wife) weeps in a cleaning closet and Carlina lies in the marital bed. Labov puts the weeping Mrs. Tagus on the northbound El at the end, watching the train pull her away.

Register: polyphonic; Labov's Yiddish-inflected old-immigrant cadence, Mikey's blunt vernacular, Lenny's baroque academic self-justification. Comic and elegiac by turns; the emotional weight sits with Labov's tenderness and loneliness, the satire with Lenny's letter.

Key figures: Labov (narrator/frame); Mrs. Greta Tagus; Lenny Tagus; Mikey Tagus; Louis; Carlina Rentaria-Cruz; Bonnie Tagus (offstage).

CONNECTION: hyper-articulate language as evasion — explanation that metastasizes into excuse

• Crux: none
• Early text: quote Lenny's letter concedes its own bad faith: the aim is not "to explain same, since the explanation of any transgression inevitably metastasizes into excuse." [say-never:p70]; and on the phone he watches himself do it — "I found roiling out of me a torrent of misdirections, like releases of bureaucratic flatus" [:p118], which "mr. nice guy knows is manipulative, empty, and testa-mentally wicked." [:p119] [e-text]
• IJ echo: verbal facility deployed as a screen against feeling — the hyper-articulate interior that evades or performs rather than confesses. Nearest register: Hal's dense, evasive interiority (Hal confessing his worries, scene 157, p782–785; Hal wallowing, scene 172, p906–911) and, again, sincerity-as-hired-performance in the professional-conversationalist scene (scene 005, p27–31).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Cite-as-written: "testa-mentally" [:p119] is a source line-break hyphenation, preserved for the byte-check. This is a genuine DFW-wide preoccupation (language that excuses instead of tells) rather than an IJ-specific seed; crux left none, weight held at shared-preoccupation.

CONNECTION: the self bound in a "constellation" — enmeshment vs. the wish to be unbound

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Early text: quote Lenny on why betrayal is unforgivable: "by the time you reach a certain history and situation you're bound up with people, part of a larger thing. How the whole constellation becomes as liquid, and any agitation ripples." [say-never:p100]; his counter-wish — "I wish a little well-hung corner. I wish to be willful." [say-never:p129]; and the title's gloss — "who first said never say never. I told her it must have been someone alone." [say-never:p100] [e-text]
• IJ echo: IJ's family/relational enmeshment — the individual as a node in a web of obligation (the Incandenza constellation) that both constitutes and constrains the self; the impossibility of the freely "unbound" person. The echo is diffuse across IJ's family material rather than one scene.
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: IJ-locator flag: deliberately no single scene pinpoint — the enmeshment/constellation figure is a whole-book preoccupation in IJ, and inventing a scene id would be false precision. Same carried-over crux as Batch 1 (solipsism-enmeshment); registered as preoccupation. The "constellation" image (people as a gravitational system whose every motion ripples) is the load-bearing verbal link.

9. Everything Is Green

Capsule (factual)

A brief first-person monologue in a working-class vernacular voice. Mitch, 48, addresses his younger live-in lover Mayfly the morning after a hard rain, in a trailer. He believes she is lying to him (probably about another man): "When it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her" (p2). He recounts what he has given her — everything, "with my hands and my heart both" — and names the imbalance: "there is all of me going in to you and nothing of you is coming back any more" (p8). Mayfly, looking out the window, says "Everything is green" (p10); Mitch itemizes everything in view that is not green (the other trailers, his truck, the gravel, beer cans), registering that they no longer share a world and that her whisper "is not to me no more" (p12). It closes on his helpless, unresolved love: "there is something in me that can not close up... Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name" (p14).

Register: demotic, ungrammatical first-person ("I have gave you," "every thing"); spare, present-tense, minimalist — the Carver-adjacent mode of the collection. Interiority delivered through plain speech.

Key figures: Mitch (narrator), Mayfly.

CONNECTION: solipsism inside intimacy — two people who no longer share a world, and the one-way flow of self into the other

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Early text: quote "now I am feeling like there is all of me going in to you and nothing of you is coming back any more" [:p8]; and the literal split of perception — "Everything is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel like when everything outside is green like it is" [:p10] — against Mitch's catalogue of all that is not green, ending "the whisper is not to me no more I know" [:p12]. [e-text]
• IJ echo: IJ's communication-and-solipsism spine — the impossibility of getting inside another person's head, isolation within a relationship, two people narrating incompatible realities. Nearest IJ register: the interior-isolation cluster around Kate Gompert's depression, scene 135 (p692–698); the failed intimacy of the father/son "professional conversationalist" scene 005 (p27–31).
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Genuine thematic kinship — the "everything is green / but everything is not green" disagreement dramatizes the private-world problem IJ treats at length — but registered as preoccupation, not a plot prefiguration.

CONNECTION: the inarticulate blue-collar man whose feeling exceeds his words

• Crux: none
• Early text: quote Mitch's whole voice — ungrammatical, plain, unable to reach the thing it feels: "I can not feel what to say" [:p3]; "In me there is needs which you can not even see any more" [:p6]; the final "there is something in me that can not close up, in that looking" [:p14]. [e-text]
• IJ echo: IJ's demotic registers and the feeling-but-inarticulate working-class voice — Don Gately above all (blue-collar Boston, the AA idiom of ache without vocabulary), and the collection of non-standard voices (Wardine, yrstruly) IJ deploys for the same purpose. No single scene is definitive; Gately's interiority runs through the recovery-house material broadly.
• Weight: verbal-echo
• Notes: Weakest block in the batch, recorded for completeness. This is register-kinship (a Wallace-wide mode) rather than an IJ-specific link; weight held at verbal-echo. IJ-locator flag: deliberately no scene pinpoint — the echo is a voice/register affinity diffuse across IJ's Gately material, and inventing a locator would overclaim.

10. Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

The collection's closing double-length novella — the EUP program itself in fiction and the highest-signal single item in the pre-1996 corpus — has its own standalone note: gwch-westward (audited capsule + 9 CONNECTION blocks, 3 at prefiguration).

---

Themes

Entertainment as industry and consumable (LEA's "game show incarnate"; Girl's compulsively rewatched commercial; John Billy's pacifying bootleg; Westward's last commercial) · irony/sincerity and the EUP program (My Appearance is the essay's thesis dramatized in 1989) · communication/solipsism — the collection's densest thread, six stories · anhedonia / the affect-dead interior (Girl, Lyndon, Westward's Mark Nechtr) · the watched self / figurant (LEA's blank faces, Lyndon's Boyd) · masks and the unreachable other (LEA's no-fingerholes speech → joelle-veil sighting) · annular/curve structure (line-vs-circle, corpus-wide) · addiction-adjacent consumption (pacifier-entertainments, not IJ's disease register — uniformly held at honest weights) · demotic / non-standard voices (Everything Is Green, John Billy → IJ's Wardine/yrstruly/Gately registers).

Cross-references

• gwch-westward — the standalone Westward note (story 10; the collection's highest-signal item; the batch-2 Lyndon curve-bridge and the anhedonia / communication-solipsism threads culminate there).
• e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections — the essay this collection prefigures: My Appearance and LEA are its fiction companions four years early; the irony-as-armor and entertainment-as-industry material cross-cite throughout.
• IJ anchors most cited by the blocks: scene 162 (pp. 827–845, the wraith's figurant monologue — anchors the LEA and Lyndon figurant sightings); scene 135 (pp. 692–698, Kate Gompert/anhedonia); scene 005 (pp. 27–31, professional conversationalist); scene 087 (pp. 410–418, Mario's InterLace/ad-history film); scene 007 (pp. 33–37, the Medical Attaché); and the AA-doctrine cluster, scene 074, 092 (the recovery material whose failed-flight logic Here and There's "do a geographic" reaches toward via the real-world AA "Geographical Cure" idiom — a term the novel itself never uses).

Notable passages

Curated per story from the audited batch lists (full lists in the batch files); all [e-text], locators = raw ¶-indices:

• "She's like some lens, a filter for that great unorganized force that some in the industry have spent their whole lives trying to locate and focus." [little-expressionless-animals:p212]
• "the TV comes to be their whole emotional world... they're outside the set, and everything else is inside the set." [little-expressionless-animals:p289]
• "Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto." [little-expressionless-animals:p382]
• "They shared pain, though of course neither knew." [luckily-the-account-representative-knew-cpr:p10]
• "my punkrocker clique all felt as if they had nothing and would always have nothing therefore they made the nothing into everything." [girl-with-curious-hair:p30]
• "thus his concerts were linear, Keith Jarrett's piano performance was a line instead of a composed and round circle." [girl-with-curious-hair:p28]
• "responsibility, why, it is not even like a feeling at all" [lyndon:p314] / Boyd's gloss: "You can't feel what responsibility feels like? It numbs you?" [lyndon:p315]
• "we all, even and especially Glory Joy, got glazed and apolitical, also torpid, docile, our minds in a deep loose neutral gear" [john-billy:p134]
• "I find in myself a need to get very away. To do a geographic." [here-and-there:p24]
• "I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad." [here-and-there:p76]
• "Sincerity is out... The joke is now on people who're sincere." [my-appearance:p61]
• "He's making money ridiculing the exact things that have put him in a position to make money ridiculing things." [my-appearance:p110]
• "you're bound up with people, part of a larger thing. How the whole constellation becomes as liquid, and any agitation ripples." [say-never:p100]
• "now I am feeling like there is all of me going in to you and nothing of you is coming back any more." [everything-is-green:p8]
• (Westward's list lives in its note.)