A Search For Belonging: David Foster Wallace's Fictional Communities

Abstract

As a writer popularly known for his fervent self-interrogations and encyclopedic second novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s most apparent significance in US literary history lies in his explicit response to his postmodern predecessors, such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. In his now infamous essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” Wallace argued that postmodern authors had over-invested in the literary tools of irony and self-reference to such a degree that they became complicit in the erosion of the same communal principles that broadcast television attacks in its bid for increasing consumer dependency and profit. In search of a way beyond this complicity, Wallace called for a brand of “anti-rebels” who would discard irony for earnest principles and teach us how to resist the temptations of the United States’ consumer culture. This call was heard by literary critics. “E Unibus Pluram” is the center for arguments over Wallace’s fiction, as critics discuss whether that essay expresses the literary project Wallace actually pursued and to what extent it should guide our reading practices. One problem this dissertation identifies in these discussions is an overemphasis on specific devices like irony that Wallace analyzes in “E Unibus Pluram.” Though important for understanding his argument, this overemphasis comes at the expense of our seeing the deeper problem that Wallace identifies in “E Unibus Pluram,” which is the atomization of US culture that is fueled by our addiction to pleasure-based commodities like television. The loss of focus on this central problem has led to confusion in readings of Wallace that fail to see the abiding concerns that he carried from his first work to his last. This dissertation seeks to remedy this problem by reading Wallace’s mature fiction as a developing struggle against the atomization of US culture. In this struggle, Wallace launched a series of increasingly complex narrative strategies for promoting a communal way of life to his readers. This dissertation reads several of these strategies to reveal two developments in Wallace’s thought: his diagnosis of the problems facing US culture as created by an unmitigated individualism and his understanding of the best way to respond to individualism by emphasizing the great importance of social institutions. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Wallace pictured fictional communities throughout his career as a means of critiquing the atomized space of the contemporary United States. He built these communities to help readers see that there are different ways to occupy the world than those promoted by consumer capitalism, but he also structured his narratives to teach readers how to see and think in the ways he thought necessary for realizing such alternatives.