Scene 17 " the paradoxical phase"

[Mark Kohut]

Does our poetic novelist play with various meanings of the paradoxical phase, "when weak stimuli get strong responses" in this section? 
Besides the psychological, which I have also felt in later readings as a thematic turning of the screw, that is, even weaker, they/we"re all trapped. More of the no escaping wrap.

You can't even sleep--"a certain early stage of sleep" .....which reminds that this one long and then short paragraph, with a line break, is narrated in the second person....a rare narrator use ( but TRP uses all kinds of narrators in GR, even multiple at once as Jochen once pointed out, I think)....most known to me in BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY. 
Ends with a knock on the door that wakes Pointsman up who, paradoxically, has been sleeping thru the screaming in the skies. 

Pointsman's team is, paradoxically, quite weak now, only two of the original seven owners of The Book left. He, however fantasizes more about figuring out Slotrop and winning his Nobel. 

I jump to thinking of some historical situations when the reaction is strongest as the cause gets weaker. 


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