white flag

The surrender image Boston AA runs on, and the name the novel's central AA meeting takes (see the White Flag Group): to wave the white flag is to quit fighting — to admit the Disease has beaten you and hand over the very will that lost, AA's capital-S Surrender. The recovery sections put it flatly: "You have to Starve The Spider: you have to surrender your will" (p. 357). The idiom itself surfaces in Michael Pemulis's mouth, arguing against Hal's plan to quit everything at once: if you truly need a substance, "what do you imagine happens if you just hoist the white flag and try to go on without it, without anything?" (endnote 321, p. 1065) — the novel's two institutions of surrender and self-will trading their one shared word.