Don Gately Character Analysis

1.) When we are first introduced to Don Gately, it is in the moments leading up to right before he hits his rock bottom and where he spends the rest of his sections trying to avoid going back to. Gately’s addiction to the narcotics, Demerol and Talwin, lead him to start burglarizing homes since his addiction has become too expensive for him to afford by himself. One person, he burglarizes was the Assistant District Attorney that caused him to detox during his 92 day stint in Revere Holding. Before the robbery, Gately knew that the Assistant DA and his wife were supposedly out for the night at a local charity event in Marblehead. Gately stole the Assistant DA’s coin collection and two antique shotguns. The next and final illegal act the reader sees is at a different man’s home in Brookline. Gately presumed the house was unoccupied until he came across the owner, who was sick with the flu or a cold. Thus, seeing the man caused Gately to panic so he ordered the man to listen to him or he wouldn’t get hurt. Gately ends up tying the man up and gagging him with a piece of …show more content…
He always is asking himself why him out or what did he do to deserve this. These questions only plague him when he is recovery at the hospital and right before we see him go into his presumed final fever dream. In the dream, he is on a beach and it becomes a symbol for his rebirth and new self that is no longer addicted to drugs. In this final scene, David Foster Wallace manages to make the reader experience the euphoric feeling of being on the beach with Gately by stretching out the sentences to lead the reader into their own dream like state. The sentences also start out mixing Gately’s reality in the hospital, but then become saturated by sensory imagery at the