He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. "Stunning…Wallace is an astonishing storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned to read in the first place." - San Francisco Chronicleĭavid Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player.
Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion").Įach of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind.
This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness - a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. To quote the registered motto of O Verily Productions, a fictional company that figures prominently in “The Suffering Channel,” the collection’s concluding novella, “CONSCIOUSNESS IS NATURE’S NIGHTMARE” ( OB 282, all caps in original). Although Wallace has amply explored solipsism before-it is, after all, one of his signature themes- Oblivion looks beyond mere solipsism to explore the multiple ways in which his characters are not only alone inside their heads but also controlled, sometimes to the point of madness, by the layered, nested, entropic workings of their interiors. Each of these long, introspective pieces explores with tireless ingenuity both the linguistic nature of interior experience and the neurological mechanisms of the mind. Yet these stories also deepen what Stephen Burn has called “Wallace’s career-long fascination with consciousness” (Burn “Paradigm” 373). From first to last, the book is a somber portrait of souls in isolation.
Though the eight stories that comprise the collection provide brief instances of humor and postmodern play, these moments are rare and easy to miss, or at least to forget, amid the ponderous intensity of the prose and the hermetic isolation Wallace imposes upon his protagonists. Of all of David Foster Wallace’s books, Oblivion is the bleakest.
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