Hal and Gately converged in some ways near the end. Both end up attending Ennet house meetings, and are connected to Joelle, and have a dangerous addiction to drugs, but there's more....
I feel like we a got a lot of horizontal or reposed imagery near the end, especially with the two of them. There was the scene where Hal was lying in his room and can't get up (902), and the scene with Gately falling onto the floor when he's really drugged up (938), Gately being stuck in the hospital bed, and of course the end, with Gately lying on the cold sand at the beach. All of these reposed positions kept evoking a death/corpse image for me.
There were also a lot of lack of physical sense and bodily control. Gately recalls being on drugs and "remembers he acutally had to prod himself in teh bladder to feel if he had to go to the bathroom" (938), and then being in the hospital bed and needing a nurse to change his catheter, and being unable to express himself. Hal also has been losing the connection between his inner sentiments and outward expression, as we see when he's crying and doesn't even notice, or has to feel his face to know the facial expression he's wearing. Both men experience a complete breakdown of bodily control and physical sense.
I think I agree with you. I began to see a lot of similarities between Hal and Gately. Hal was lying horizontally, Gately was lying in bed, Hal and Gately both were struggling to give up drugs (even though Gately's was kind of a renewed struggle). Also, both were young and talented athletes. Hal seems to experience more of a paralysis of the face, whereas Gately's is kind of the body and the voice. However, I totally see your point, I just don't know the reason for this "merging" of two characters.
This is probably completely wrong, but I was thinking about how Gately and Hal both struggled from several addictions at once (like drugs, tennis, etc.). They definitely have similarities. Maybe Wallace is making some sort of a statement about addiction? How, no matter who you are, when it hits you'll all end up the same? Kind of a downer thought, especially for a novel so invested in AA and recovery . . .
The parellel drawn between Hal and Gately reminds of that scene during Eschaton when Hal has to feel his face to see if he is wincing, suggesting that his own emotions are no longer transparent to him. The common thread with Gately is alienation from one's own psychosomatic state. In our increasingly TV, filmic, and just generally virtual culture, it seems reasonable that people would have trouble producing the "correct" reactions to situations. When a friends tells you they broke up with their partner, are you sympathetic because that's the natural reaction, or because that's what freinds are "supposed to do" according to media representations? When the lines between fiction and reality blur as they have in all the work we've read this semester, or even when fiction comes, curiously, to proceed reality, all of us are always kind of checking our emotions and actions against fictive rubrics. Are you living your life the way a young person should? Going to enough parties? Hooking up with enough people? However you answer these questions, the salient point is that it has become hard to define the criteria of what constitutes "young person behavior"
My question is, when did the digging up the head happen? Did it happen? Gately has a dream while lying in the hospital that he and Hal are digging up the head... but that's the only mention of it after the first mention on page 16. Someone in class mentioned the idea that some elements of the book actually happen and some could be excerpts from films. But what about dreams? Where doe the reality start and stop in regard to Gately's dreams?