“There is a beautiful sentence in Waiting for Godot which says: ‘We are all born mad, only a few remain so.’ Meaning, of course, that the state of madness (or irrationality) is preferable to what we call sanity (or rationality).” Could this be the writer Federman leaving us another clue? In the same interview, he goes on to explain that the old man of The Twofold Vibration is always on the edge of madness, obsessed with the idea of madness. That all of Federman's characters “are beings who have been turned loose in the world (the fictional world of course) and who are never sure whether they are going to become rational or if they are going to remain irrational. Like Beckett's creatures, they are all born mad, and some of them will remain so.”

Federman then explains that his early characters are too caught up in this irrationality to develop self-awareness: “My characters do not reflect, they endure. Reflection only begins with The Twofold Vibration.” Only in The Twofold Vibration do they become, temporarily, sane. Yet the state of madness remains preferable, a longed-for state. When Moinous resurrects in Federman's next novel, Smiles on Washington Square, he is almost completely cured. Only a dirty, one-legged pigeon can remind him of his former life: “Any substitution, however unsatisfactory or unfulfilling it may be, of something he once loved, is a form of calmative.” Beckett's novella The Calmative was edited by Federman with Pinget's Journal, in a book destined to students of French, some fifteen years before. The old man in The Calmative asks only for a kiss, but he is not to be trusted.

As this study has demonstrated, there are many clues pointing to the second closet. But the clues themselves are redundant, unnecessary to proving the existence of homoerotic themes. Loulou, the jazzmen, Claude, Sam the dog and a recurring anonymous “fag” who propositions the young protagonist each provide ample evidence. The closet is useless because it isn't hiding anything, except of course the even greater presence of Sam. In the closet space, Sam is not only above but also behind the whole fictional setup.