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For me, the biggest theme with Hal so far is his hyper-awareness of the difference between the way he sees himself and the way others see him. On page five, he "compose[s] what I project will be seen as a smile," (emphasis added) but Athletic Affairs takes it to be a grimace: "Is he in pain? Are you in pain, son?"
Clearly, Hal is smart. Really smart. Smarter than the average bear. I feel like this might actually have something to do with the "something [he] ate" (10), the patch of fungal basement mold—hey, it wouldn't be the first case of fungal-enhanced consciousness, if you get my drift. That section on pp. 10-11, in fact, strikes me as analogous to the Biblical fall of Man and subsequent exile from Eden. Hal is in his mother's garden, presumably a normal kid at this point, but he eats this nasty basement stuff and his poor mother, who seems sort of rigid and dour with her "presbyopic squint," either cannot or does not want to understand him when he says, "I ate this." Instead, she goes into hysterics, and starts pacing in circles around the square garden. Hal tries to follow her, but trips on the twine fencing. Their relationship has changed. Hal has changed.
Yet exactly in what way has he changed? It depends on whose perspective you take, whose story you accept. Hal understands himself to be brilliant, possibly the smartest human who has ever lived. On page 12, my favorite passage so far, he becomes almost god-like, trying to explain himself calmly and rationally while the Deans look on in uncomprehending horror. "There is nothing wrong," he says. "I'm in here." Then, "I am not what you see and hear."
The Deans, however, see it differently. "Like an animal," they say about him (14). "Subanimalistic noises and sounds." They think he's disturbed, or retarded, possibly even dangerous. "His face," one of them says. "As if he was strangling. Burning. I believe I've seen a vision of hell."
Has anyone here read William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell? Famous passage: "...I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity." My reproduction of this quote is out of context, but it gets at the gist of what Wallace is saying here. Based on what we know so far, what is Hal? We know he's become more or less incomprehensible to others. But does that make him a genius, or an animal?
I'm going with genius. If we can trust Hal's narration—not necessarily trusting that everything he says is true, but trusting it insofar as we believe it to be coming from him, and not someone else—then we know he's operating on a higher level than the Deans give him credit for. There is a nice image on page 16 that gives us an inkling of the actual situation, in which Hal is being prepped by the medics for an ambulance ride, and the Deans and C.T. are debating the necessity of his hospitalization. Hal observes: "The issue whether the damaged even have interested wills is shallowly hashed out as some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead to hear slices the sky from south to north" (16).
Hal is that ultra-mach fighter, and indeed, nobody can hear him.
EDIT: The more I think about it, the more it seems that the Blake allusion might have been DFW's intention. Incandenza brings to mind "incandescent," which refers to artificial light, as if from a lightbulb. Hal, like Lucifer, is a bearer of light—delight!—but it is a harsh light, it burns too brightly, and people cannot bear to look at it directly. Think about the Erdedy section, in which light is represented as an intruding force, as a "shadow of light" (17) that obscures vision. Erdedy would rather live in the isolated darkness of a smoke-filled room, practically Plato's cave, illuminated only by the pathetic flickering of his TP set. But now I'm creeping into spoiler territory, and so I'll be quiet.
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