‘They All Sound Like David Foster Wallace’: Syntax and Narrative in Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion and The Pale King

Abstract

What kind of syntactic arrangement produces the distinctive feel of a Wallace sentence, and how does sentence structure relate to Wallace’s wider themes, the larger narrative structures of his fiction, and the construction of his fictional worlds? The length and complexity of Wallace’s sentences has often been remarked on, and sometimes satirised, but this essay breaks new ground by looking in detail at the syntactic structure of Wallace’s sentences to understand the work done by that structure in the creation both of character and of ontologically complex fictional worlds. The essay is structured around close readings of individual sentences from Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion and The Pale King . I show that in Infinite Jest syntactic complexity is associated with addiction and with intractable psychological binds. Moving forward from Infinite Jest , I argue, Wallace pushes his fiction in two distinct directions. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men focuses on voice, the format of the ‘Brief Interviews’ in particular allowing Wallace to represent character mimetically through speech. Oblivion , on the other hand, indulges Wallace’s characteristic authorial voice in all its oppressive maximalism, in order to explore its unique narrative possibilities. In particular, Wallace uses complex, hypotactically structured sentences to create fictional worlds in which the relationship between the actual and the conditional or hypothetical is often unstable. In The Pale King, despite its incompleteness, Wallace shows signs of achieving, I argue, a synthesis of the two, fusing the narrative and ontological complexity of Oblivion with the mimetic polyphony of Brief Interviews .