The final three chapters in Pry really stood out to me because these three chapters really took the effects work and psychological aspect up to 11. The work done in the first 4 chapters did a good job of building up James’ character, and from chapter 5 onwards you start to see his psyche grow more and more chaotic and confusing.
One of my favorite parts of Chapter 5 was the fact that there is actually a bit of multilinearity involved. Chapter 5 opens up where Chapter 4 left off. James gets up to go to a new job, Luke was fired from the last one. During the drive to the new job, he continues to have self-hating thoughts that he isn’t good enough, that Luke doesn’t trust James, etc. When he arrives on site he walks across a railroad. At this point two things can happen. Either you keep James’ eyes open to the point where his vision blurs and he falls off the railway track, or you open and close periodically and make it all the way to the end, only to transition into his thoughts. In both instances, his subconscious is brought to the forefront, while reality is placed where the subconscious has been since the start of the story. I think it represents his continual descent into his own mind, and how he is starting to lose his grasp on what is real and what isn’t. Chapter 7 really brings this home with the constant back and forth between different moments in time, blurring the line between reality and memory.