/lit/ - Literature

>>6497823
bump

DFW:
>inb4 I'm a fraud
BEE:
>DFW a fraud

>>6498115
Guessing you didn't really care for that whole trickery.

I was expecting something like that but this so it wasn't new but it is I think his best example of doing metafiction from what I've read.

>>6498115
Guessing you didn't really care for that whole trickery.

I was expecting something like this so it wasn't new but it is I think his best metafiction from what I've read.

While it is Wallace dealing with suicide from his own perspective, and he recognizes this in the story, I think that assuming that's all there is to his suicide is a bit dumb. If the insecurities dealt in it had been enough he would had killed himself before ending that story instead of before ending Pale King. I also think that he wouldn't had exposed himself to such a degree in which family and friends would had worried about him, if anything he's exposing the things he has already dealt with while hiding his real issues.

>>6498142
Ok but what did you think of the story

>>6498160
Oh, I really liked how he broke the structure towards the end turning fiction into essay of sorts. It's weird to see authors use third person when discussing themselves and I liked how it played out, I doubt it would work in most cases even if it did here.
It's a bit repetitive at parts, less than other stuff (like that story about the primitive king, god, that was too much even for dfw) but still a bit tedious at moments.

>>6498261
When you were reading it did you relate to the main character and how he felt being a fraud?

The whole thing until the end was very weird for me because I felt that if I had read this when I was 16 I would have loved it but I'm 23 and it all seemed so trite. I know it is just a character but still.

I'm just wondering if the only reason I liked, or at least didn't immediately hate, this story was because of the presentation.

In Forever Overhead it wasn't just the presentation but the content, the plot/character, and the prose itself that I liked.

Here the prose only got interesting toward the end when the speaker had some urgency in him.

>>6498314
The prose did improve heavily towards the end, I'm guessing that Wallace had that part really well cemented in his head while the rest was just a very long introduction. I think that, TO A CERTAIN EXTENT, the idea is to show how poor and generic our justifications for suicide tend to be. As if Wallace was showing how generic we would assume his suicide would be since he assumed that about his friends'; but at the time of reading it I got the feel that he just focused much more in the style of the end.

>>6498364
And what about the "trickery"? Did you notice any weird patterns, like how the analyst might be a stand in for the reader, and how the reader was constantly trying to get ahead of DFW by thinking he already knew what the character would do, but then the character acknowledges this, saying he wanted the analyst/reader to think this because he is a fraud?

>>6498406
>but then the character acknowledges this
That was nice the first time, but it turns into a constant element so I doubt it was a reveal or something like that (that's what I'm getting from you I think). It was just another part of the characterization, how he's trying to think ahead of everyone while failing to deal with what's going on at the time.
The psychoanalyst seemed more as a mockery of the field than anything else. Similarly with the meditation master, who could perfectly just be playing along without knowing anything.
At the end, I think, the big point is how no one actually understands anyone else; because the MC doesn't actually understand the psychiatrist or the zen master or the hip people or anyone, he just thinks they know what he knows. Sort of how a writer constructs characters based on his limited interpretation of how real people are, but at the end it's just an echo chamber.

>>6498435
Is there anything that would lead you to think that the way I read it was weaker than yours, and that yours is more correct? I don't mean that to be argumentative,

I just never considered while reading the story that the character didn't actually succeed in tricking everyone, which is why I focused on the reader/author thing being represented by the main character/other characters.

Wallace/Neal is constantly trying to trick everyone, and one way he does is to make people think they've found out that he is trying to trick them, when really Wallace/Neal wants them to think that so he can continue some other trick.

If he actually never succeeded like you said and just thought he was tricking people then the story loses a lot of its punch for me since there is no constant back and forth and what is a lie or not, because simply you know that it is Wallace/Neal saying that they are succeeded and through tragic irony we know they always fail. Not really a trick then, just sad.

>>6498492
Jesus I fucked up a bunch of those sentences.

>>6498492
Oh, I think he succeeds because things play out as if he did, but I doubt people even dedicate that much attention to him. He's trying to prove himself against society but society doesn't share a single mind, it's always his. If he defeats the psychiatrist or not, it has no correlation to how well it goes in his meditations or his tennis or his coke habit. The fact that he correlates all those practices show how convincing the people or not is a secondary thing. At the end he isn't lying at all because there is no basic truth, you can't lie if what you're saying/doing is all you know. The only think he isn't open about is how manipulative he sees himself, but there is nothing not manipulative that he could had said besides recognizing that feeling. During the whole story there is a single lie and that is pretending that he doesn't feel as if he cheated.

But I also think that it has some relation with how Wallace saw that guys life, after all they both started the same way and Wallace chose a path of absuive sincerity (both recognized by writing essays about his ideas and feelings and implied by the fact of being a writer and showing the world how you understand emotions and ideas). I think that the comparison between wallace and the character is too easy at some levels, and doing so makes you forget that they could perfectly be two different facets or two different takes on life.

I'm working a lot of this as I type it, so I wouldn't defend my ideas too much. It's just what I got from the story and it obviously is marked by my own feelings about the topics in it.

>>6498545
It's ok, most of what you said made sense, I just saw some patterns that dealt with trying to track what lies were being presented to us in order to distract us, and what lies seem to be the genuine lies and what those lies are trying to cover up (which seems to be nothing since he doesn't know why he lies in the first place on account that he is a character made up by Wallace).

Put it this way.

He says he is a liar and keeps trying to convince the reader that he is a liar, however the way he goes about it is fishy. He keeps saying he wont go into examples but then goes into the examples anyway. I'm guessing that this is supposed to make the reader react to the character, wondering if everything so far has been a lie.

Then you get to the first paradox, if someone tells you they are a liar, and not just a liar but a true fraud who can't stop themselves from lying, then what they just said must be a lie (so they can't always be lying(but then if they are not always lying then some things they say might be true, opening up the possibility that they were telling the truth that they were a true fraud who must always lie (then were back to the beginning))).

The character brings this up, and not only this but brings up the difficulty of chronological time and the limits of English when trying to explain things such as the above, a liar's paradox.

So ok there is that, the the psychiatrist comes in and it appears to be a surrogate for the reader. The character/wallace says I'm a fraud (for wallace, a writer, someone who lies as their profession) and the analyst tries catch them in an inconsistency, that they cant be a true fraud if what they just said is the truth (this brings up the liar's paradox).

On top of this, the main character/wallace says that this telling-the-truth-that-I-am-a-fraud is a setup for the analyst/reader, that the main character/wallace wants them to react this way, to think that they have caught them (to think they have beat wallace by noticing the paradox), when if you think about it wallace put it there in the first place, so it's just a trap.

Then there is the confusion of him being dead the whole time, time not being linear in the story, and Wallace himself showing up as a character, and the character recognizing that he himself is a character even though he was speaking as if he was the narrator/writer, and that Wallace is the actual writer.

Still, all that for what?

>>6498981
I'm really liking your analysis and you're making me want to go through the story again marking the layers and sublayers of lies. Still, with my previous reading, the main thing I got was the impossibility of actually knowing what other people are thinking, with the last pages referring to how even when creating a fictional character around him Wallace wasn't really capable of knowing what he was going through.