What follows is a reflection from the reading of pages 809 – 851, what we in the group have been calling “The Wraith,” but what might more accurately be called, The Fever Dream. It’s what’s going on in the mind of Don Gately as he lies in a bed in a room in a hospital, recovering, perhaps, from the gunshot wound he took defending his charges at the halfway house (601-619) from a revenge/retribution attack by the Nucks, whose dog Randy Lenz had just killed.
I think most of us agree by now that what Wallace has done w/r/t characterization is put himself, his personality, his “soul,” (p 810) or fragmented pieces of it, into many of the characters he created. In other words, we’re getting bits and pieces of Wallace in the different characters and sometimes they merge, they have similar thoughts, speak with the same idiosyncrasies, and certainly reflect thoughts that Wallace had had at one time or another.
Here, Gately is “fever-dreaming,” (p 816) and imagines a ghost-like person, a wraith, that comes and visits him. It’s described even what the wraith looks like and he resembles James Orin Incandenza, who Gately had never met. The two of them get into a conversation or “interface.” The reason for Gately’s fever-dreaming is that he refuses pain medication, b/c he fears if he takes just one hit (my words) of a narcotic-like substance, that will be considered a relapse by the crocodiles of AA, and also that he has not the will power to stop once he starts – he’ll go right back to his old robbing and stealing and druging and general stupid thuggish self, that he hates and is ashamed of (according to Joelle van D., the PGOAT (531- 538) and girl of his fevered desires.) We learn of Gately’s childhood, a horrific affair, where he watched his step-father (?) beat his mother and did nothing to stop it. We learn that mother and son never spoke of the beatings, ever, to each other or anyone else. We learn that being sober brings memories up that he (Gately) doesn’t want to think about, or the combination of soberness and interface w/others. Gately hates himself … and then the “garden-variety wraith,” appears. (p.829) Who it turns out, might be, might, be JOI and not a “garden-variety wraith,” which is your basic ownself as ghost before you die. No, no, no – it’s JOI because he knows about Hal and talks about Hal with Gately and how hard it is to communicate with a boy who won’t interface properly, he (Hal) was a “hidden boy,” (838) which JOI feared for himself as well. (Thus the Wild Turkey? Is that ever made clear?) And no one would pay any attention to the mute boy, or to his father (JOI); and no one or thing was successful at getting the boy to “come out,” even fun & games and trickery. (see pgs. 27-31) And so now JOI resorts to sobriety and AA, which he hates, AA, “… he (the wraith) never could stand the vapid clichés and disdain for abstraction.” (p 839) and finally to making a film, b/c that’s what he does, “The Entertainment,” some kind of sex/goddess film to get some kind of reaction out of Hal: “To bring him ‘out of himself.’” (839) Which we (readers) know from before was unsuccessful and led to JOI going back to drink and blowing himself up in the microwave. We also learn that Gately thinks the wraith can read his mind so he doesn’t have to speak, they can communicate without talking, but that the wraith insists that even really bad, “the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hidden-ness on either side.” (p. 839) Nice Dave. Nice dream scenario.
Now, if that isn’t all just flat-out crazy, I don’t know crazy. Or maybe all just a dream so not crazy at all. “Then he considered that this was the only dream he could recall where even in the dream he knew it was a dream, much less lay there considering the fact that he was considering the up-front dream quality of the dream he was dreaming. It quickly got so multileveled and confusing that his eyes rolled back in his head. (p.830)
And then Death comes, and it’s Joelle, the PGOAT, and she tells Gately that you never really die, but have many lives – but that a woman will kill you – and then that woman, your killer, becomes your next life’s mother – which is why mothers love their children the way they do – because they are trying to make amends for the murder of you, which neither you nor they really remember. (850)
One thing we know now – nothing worked with Mr. Dave Wallace. Not anti-depressants, not psychotherapy, not ECT (shock treatments) not sex, not fame, or quote, loving parents, or quote, a loving wife. What seemed to work was marijuana, and somebody, way early on when he was still a boy, before his personality had fully formed, told him, or he had the thought, that he had to quit that stuff, and drinking, and smoking, that he needed help – special care and treatment. He was a sick boy, depressed. And so Mr. David Wallace wrote a book to try and communicate but not many people read the book and those that did still misunderstood what he was saying. What does a person have to do to be heard, to be understood? What I see in the Fever Dream is a convergence of the three elements of the human condition that predict suicide. It’s a sad, sad story. Indeed – a failed entertainment.