If everything after noodles smoking at the opium den is a hallucination, was max knocking noodles unconscious to keep him away from their final delivery also a figment of noodle's imagination; a way of convincing himself that it was max who kept noodles alive, when instead noodles might simply have found an excuse to stay away?
shareI think there might have been some revision of the past in his opium dream too. After Noodles rapes Debra, he sees a newspaper at the train station announcing the end of Prohibition. But in subsequent scenes, it is clear that Prohibition still exists, though is expected to end soon. Instead of regarding this as a goof, I see it as dream work, where everything seems to be leading up to the end of Prohibition.
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