ok i know they’re talking about a literal casket but. BOOK AS TOMB
i still can’t believe gerry literally died and then got trapped in a book and so he just had to continue existing as a page in a volume, no longer alive but not fully dead… herman melville voice pages and chapters as stoneless graves…. death can’t reach you in a book but also a book is no place for human life; life cannot be fully captured in sentences and so sentences cannot support continued life… this is just an extreme example of what happens to statement givers in a more figurative way like. when your statement is taken you are reduced to a record of what happened to you, preserving your story at the cost of your humanity