the wraith

The ghost that sits on the rail of Don Gately's hospital bed and converses directly inside his head, introducing itself as "just a plain old wraith, one without any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic garden-variety wraith" (p. 829). Everything it says — the filmmaking, the figurant idea (see that entry), the grief over a son going empty and mute — identifies it as James O. Incandenza (pp. 829-845). The published text also hints the same wraith is behind the phenomena plaguing Ortho Stice; the manuscript history made that explicit (see Wraithster).