Interesting that you mention that about Volcano because I've always been similarly struck by the way he masterfully contrasts and cross-references "The gates are closin'/ As I'm frozen/ In time." with the image in Grey Room: "Nothing is lost/ it’s just frozen in frost/And it’s opening time/ there’s no one in line.".
Far from just being a connective thread, with stunning economy this completes an entire arc of a character's growth by filling in the obstensibly eternal gap in which the narrator came to finally recognize that (like the everyman protagonist of "The Pilgrim's Progress") all along he had held the key of promise to release himself from the prison of despair.
While some may dismiss such a concept as inorganic or pat, a common criticism of GR's climactic shift into optimism, the indestructible bulwark against such callow cynicism must be authenticity itself since (as Cervantes before him) the story is derived from Bunyan's own incarcerated plight and triumph over it by the very act of writing which, albeit metaphoric, is essentially the manner in which the melancholic duo of Shakespeare's Dane and Damo did too.
While many writers merely repeat themselves due to laziness or limitation it's a mark of history's greatest artists to re-examine and find entirely new possibilities to build upon or improve what they've previously attempted to say.
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