/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22540580]

Just realised that he wrote a book about the three certainties of life: love, death, and taxes

[Anonymous No.22540602]

What a hack

[Anonymous No.22540638]

>>22540580
>three certainties of life
>Love
This is an incel website, you know. Don't go around spouting this kinda shit

[Anonymous No.22540656]

>taxes are a certainty in life
then how come scientology doesn't pay them?

[Anonymous No.22542350]

>>22540580
>love
The two characters who supposedly in love are too wrapped up in themselves to actually be in love, for Lane Dean Jr it is an affect just like is religion. For Rand the only thing she loves is herself and not in that self help newage sense but the pure narcissistic self love.
>death
Only touched on in the most marginal way unless you are one of those retards who try and tie his suicide into the novel.
>taxes
Symbolic and he explains the symbolism rather directly more than once.

Did you even read it?

[Anonymous No.22542492]

>>22542350
I think you are too dumb to truly understand the novel. There is far more depth and complexity in all of those areas, and in Wallace's approach to them, than you've set out there. I think he's a bit above your paygrade, honestly, that you took so little from the novel, or only see love as man and woman in relationship. The relationship, and subsequent death of Chris Fogle's father, and his processing and understanding of it, and ultimately his understanding his love for him, is one of the most pivotal and impactful parts of the novel. The two ghosts of examiners haunting the IRS offices are also an obvious an pervasive presence in the novel as well. Every love story is a ghost story. The more I think about, the more I realise how monumentally stupid you are. And you were so arrogant in your reply as well

[Anonymous No.22542497]

>>22540656
Scientologists pay the retard tax however.

[Anonymous No.22542598]

>>22542492
>that you took so little from the novel
What did I take from the novel?

Fogle never understood what his father's death meant to him, it is no different in function to him than that period where he shaved off one sideburn. This is the entire point of Fogle.

[Anonymous No.22542647]

>>22542598
No it fucking isn't. Saying something doesn't make it true. Thinking of complex characters as serving one purpose or having one point just shows how retarded you are. Fogle's fathers dying is literally his impetus to change his whole life

[Anonymous No.22542695]

>>22542647
>impetus
It was an act of desperation, he lost his meal ticket. It was not that great awakening he tries and makes it out to be over and over and he knows it is not and he states that over and over and then says it was some great revelation. Truth is he lost his meal ticket and it was his father who had coddled him all along, not his mother. Fogle's nickname is no accident, he exposes himself through his irrelevant ramblings.

[Anonymous No.22542698]

>>22542492
Fogle’s story is a trick. He think he’s finally taken initiative by joining the tax service when in reality he’s as enslaved to the IRS as he was to his own vices in the years before his purported enlightenment. Hs father had wanted him to take initiative, yet he succumbs to the tedious yet dignified drudgery of the tax world. And his verbose circumlocutory, overly intellectual explanation for this is only a hopeless justification for what he knows was never for him.

If you truly consider all the vignettes of the novel, you’ll realise that one of the major themes of the book is the increasingly sophisticated ways in which we lie to ourselves about our own weaknesses.

[Anonymous No.22542738]

>>22542698
>the increasingly sophisticated ways in which we lie to ourselves about our own weaknesses.
And that the bulk of society feeds the lie which makes it all the easier for you to believe, someone will find a way to weaponize your autism. We see this best with Sylvanshine but the Rand/Drinian discussion gives some very interesting insights into it.

Interesting thing about Fogle is that his whole section is essentially explained right before it with the elevator conversation, but it is difficult to remember that conversation after wading through Fogle going on and on and on. But that is TPK and the point.

[Anonymous No.22542803]

>>22542738
One interesting dichotomy I’ve noticed in the book is the our awareness of ourselves vs the awareness of our surroundings. From what I remember, there’s this short scene of a guy sweating who gets nervous as to how the woman behind him perceives his sweating. What’s funny about the segment is how little it becomes about him but instead focuses on this purely imagined and increasingly omniscient being just out of sight. When I consider the story of the kid whose trained flexibility allows him to kiss each part of his body I feel it contrasts directly with this, as the kid is now wholly aware of himself, and so is no longer reliant on the eyes of those around him through which others must ever be reliant to gage a sense of their own selves.

[Anonymous No.22543039]

>>22542803
I think Stecyk, Drinian and the boy who wished to touch his lips to every part of his body are meant to sort of outline analytical methods to apply to the rest of the characters. Stecyk is fully aware of society, can only see how society as a whole sees him which blinds him to the effects he has on his family and everyone he interacts with. Drinian is the individual, has no concept of how society sees him. The boy is self as you mentioned. They each take one aspect to such an extreme that they effectively become constants that we can measure all the other characters against.

I really can not figure out that whole stigmata bit in the boy's section, sort of ties him to the character with the weird growths on his wrists that Lane Dean Jr is obsessed with but I think he is actually the fierce baby and either way it offers nothing on the whole stigmata thing. Could be insight into Sylvanshine, a glimpse into the life of the fact psychic, we are getting largely irrelevant information and much figure out how it applies or if it applies at all.

[Anonymous No.22544914]

Bump for a good thread.

[Anonymous No.22544985]

>>22543039
Adding to this, there's Garrity, one of the ghosts:

"Garrity had evidently been a line inspector for Mid West Mirror Works in the midtwentieth century. His job was to examine each one of a certain model of decorative mirror that came off the final production line, for flaws. A flaw was usually a bubble or unevenness in the mirror’s aluminum backing that caused the reflected image to distend or distort in some way. Garrity had twenty seconds to check each mirror. Industrial psychology was a primitive discipline then, and there was little understanding of non-physical types of stress. In essence, Garrity sat on a stool next to a slow-moving belt and moved his upper body in a complex system of squares and butterfly shapes, examining his face’s reflection at very close range. He did this three times a minute, 1,440 times per day, 356 days a year, for eighteen years. Toward the end he evidently moved his body in the complex inspectorial system of squares and butterfly shapes even when he was off-duty and there were no mirrors around."

Also there's a line I love in the 'turns a page section', which is linked to this: "Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror."

So yeah, perception, of self and others, is a huge fascination of the novel.

[Anonymous No.22545012]

>>22540656
Religious institutions are tax exempt

[Anonymous No.22545050]

>>22540580
I will say this - this book was an enormous comfort for the 3 years that I spent working in finance for a large utility.

[Anonymous No.22546292]

>>22544985
Probably do not want to read this if you have not read TPK yet, I would not call it a spoiler but it probably will ruin some of the magic even if I am completely wrong.

I think the phantoms are actually David Wallace, The Phantom being the nick name they have for him. If memory serves we only have two examples in the entire novel where we see David Wallace interact with others excluding when he was mistaken for the other David Wallace; in the elevator where we don't even realize that he is there until he has his one line "That example makes it a lot easier to see your point, Mr. Glendenning,’ I said.": the phantom who people don't really mind when he visits and just sort hangs around quietly, and in the break room after the terrorist attack where he is moving about attempting to covertly figure out what happened without just asking: Garrity. The character of David Wallace is essentially built off of a line about CT in IJ "I'm afraid I'm far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I'm just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that's all right, just so you know."

It is so easy to forget about the narrator in TPK, he barely exists outside of the Author here sections and the footnotes which is kind of odd for a memoir. If we view perception/awareness from his standpoint some things start to make sense structurally speaking. Stecyk, Drinian and The boy are so different from everyone else in the novel because they are the ones he could not know, they are caricatures built around what little he does know about them from office gossip and very limited contact. MEL, Sylvanshine and Reynolds also fall into this, Wallace's only encounter with them would have been in an interview like the one at the end, so MEL is pure creation and Sylvanshine/Reynolds become the joined at the hip shotgun and rifle, which refers to their interrogation tactics; Sylvanshine asks loads of seemingly meaningless questions, Reynolds mostly observing and occasionally interjecting the pointed question informed by Sylvanshine's questions. Outside of the epistolary aspects the characters are all limited by what David Wallace can learn about them from passively lurking on the fringes, the more likely a person is to go on about themselves to anyone who will listen the more realistic they are. The characters are created in a very natural way that we all engage in—we create lives for those we don't know but interest us or are forced to interact with and these created lives are always more interesting than the Fogle or Rand who they really are and we all really are—and these creations tell a fair amount about who we are and how we relate to the world/others.

And this brings us around to the meta black hole at the core of the novel but that is for another post and ultimately I think it was meant as a trap anyways, literary equivalent of infinite recursion. Hopefully I did not make a mess of this editing it down to 3000 characters.

[Anonymous No.22546595]

>>22546292
That’s a fascinating perspective to have on it, anon, and one that gets me very excited to re-read it. Thank you

[Anonymous No.22546884]

>>22542350
>Only touched on in the most marginal way unless you are one of those retards who try and tie his suicide into the novel.

[Anonymous No.22546911]

>>22542695
> p r o j e c t i o n

[Anonymous No.22548146]

>>22540580
Love is not a certainty of life.

[Anonymous No.22548813]

>>22540580
>certainty of life
>love
The voices are getting louder

[Anonymous No.22550146]

>nice, thread is still alive
>shit posting
It was nice while it lasted.