Things About Hal

-At our first encounter with him (p.12) Hal’s speech concerning his intellectual prowess (“I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives…I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated…”) is perceived by everyone else present as some kind of seizure/manic fit.

- That extremely bizarre encounter between the professional conversationalist/JOI and Hal that no one (as far as I can tell) really understood…why did Hal initially not recognize his father, what was the purpose of JOI even planning this out, considering nothing important seemed to be accomplished through the conversation..?

-We first hear about Hal’s addiction to pot/secrecy at p.47 (“Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.”)

-That horribly nauseating conversation between Hal and Orin (p. 247ish) where we discover how JOI actually died, that Hal discovered the remains of his body, etc, and the ensuing incident with the grief-therapist hired by Hal’s mother. That situation was particularly paradoxical and ironic; that Hal is so much more upset by the fact that he can’t “deliver the goods” of his grief to the therapist than by the repulsive death of his father; that the Moms is happy because Hal looks so awful, when in truth he looks awful not because of his grief but because he is unable to fake his grief. And then when he finally manages to convince the grief therapist that he’s accepted the death and moved on…why’d he get over his father’s death (or more accurately, the trauma of seeing him splattered all over the walls) so quickly?

-And finally, shortly thereafter is the mystery of Hal’s sudden “plateau-jump” and Schacht’s suggestion that it is due in part to his increased drug use (“…doesn’t say a work about Hal’s devolution from occasional tourist to subterranean compulsive, substance-wise, with his Pump Room visits and Visine, even though Schacht deep down believes that the substance-compulsion’s strange apparent contribution to Hal’s erumpent explosion up the rankings…”)

I feel like as we’re continuing on, Hal is becoming less and less easy to understand—or maybe I mean his motivations, rather. He seems to be becoming a more and more central figure, and more and more questions are arising regarding him, and hmm…where will it all lead?

Probably many new and exciting places as I finish up the 430 in the wee hours of this morning.