Cairo Overcoat function

Cairo Overcoat talk: I think I covered some basics in the Intermission book. It's an idea imported from Problem Sleuth, with object-duality properties—at times it's a coat, and at other times it's a sarcophagus. In PS, the Chicago Overcoat was the final boss's method of transport (a pirate ship) and was also an old mobster term for a coffin. When I adapted this idea for Lord English, I made both the coffin and overcoat parts of the euphemism literal, by making it a dual-state coat/sarcophagus. Okay, whew, that was an explanation, but these are the most trivial things to say about the coat. Because I seem to be making a big deal about it in this scene, you know some other stuff is going on with it. First, it's just indicative of the fact that we're waiting for LE. An empty wrapper, ready to be filled. And since it's also a vessel, his chariot awaits. The eerie, blue inner lining? The coat is yet another metafictional construct.
The blue lining is something I contrived to serve as a visual barrier between characters in the story, and things happening on the other side of the 4th wall, i.e. the "real" (fakereal) world. I put the coat up on the wall to block them from seeing any obtrusive, distracting nonsense on my side of the wall that would mess with your suspension of disbelief too much (I get into this issue more directly later with a really bad "pledge" written in SBaHJ-style font and artifacts). The consequence of this is, from the character's POV, the 4th wall appears to emulate a "blue screen of death" type of computer crash. It mimics a simple terminal glitch, which can be written off as an innocent technology malfunction. The truth though has more to do with the properties and symbolism of the coat itself. "Why don't we get back to what's happening on the other side of the coat" is the line that leads back into the story action. Which implies that the coat functions as sort of a delineating barrier between one sort of reality and another. Which the 4th wall already was, but the coat added another non-permeable layer to the dividing plane. It's like a sort of membrane, producing an almost electrostatic buffer that shields one field of narrative potential from another.

-Book 6 page 72