This story...holy shit.
Instead of a literally meaningless post why not tell us what you thought about it?
>>7878797
He just wants someone to ask him, anon! He wants to feel interesting, anon! Don't you understand?!
it's bs imho
college Americans lap it up
>>7878423
His suicide note, t b h.
>>7878797
I don't think OP's most is meaningless. It seems to me a revealing statement on both the quality of the story and its sanctification by newly-literate young males.
>>7878797
He said that he liked it. Why do we necessarly have to spoil esthetic emotions with rational thoughts?
>>7879062
False. He killed himself because he didnt want to admit he couldnt finish the pale king, as well as canonizing himself.
Best postmodern short story, AND absolutely shitting on the epoch.
Entire pomo literally BTFO by 40 pages of DFW.
Prove me wrong.
>>7879101
Can you explain a little bit, I dont know these things
>>7879103
What do you mean?
It's an indictment act versus postmodern fraudulence and inauthenticity.
While making numerous autobiographical allusions, Wallace points out what are all the core mechanisms of postmodern thought, how vacant and inhumane they are, and finally what would the proper way out for them be (the ending).
>>7879103
He can't, and neither does he.
>>7879101
OP here. Content aside, I found the style/mechanisms of the story to achieve what DFW set out to do in Infinite Jest, but without any reliance on the footnote-trope. He sought to create a sense of disorientation with the footnote, using it as a tool to mimic the frequent jumps and jumbles of human thought.
Good Old Neon, to me at least, is a clinical of how to disorient the reader. For example, DFW's character is sitting at the analyst's office and waiting for the analyst to bring up the honest-with-fraudulence paradox. DFW then spins this out for several pages with flashbacks to lying to his parents, to the repercussions on his adopted sister, to his sister's development, to his own mixed feelings on how it feels to manipulate, to the entire meta-element of continuing to manipulate and steer the analyst even though the analyst thinks he has caught DFW in a paradox. The point is, the narrative twists and turns before arrive back at the doctor opening his mouth and confirming the narrator's suspicions. All done throughout any use of the tacky footnote.
>>7879114
If anything it BTFOs itself rather than postmodernism, because it wouldn't be able to achieve the effect it has without heavily relying on postmodern narrative techniques.
In fact, the way DFW's fondness for postmodern avant-garde literature clashed with his indictment of postmodernism as "insincere" or self-defeating and the resulting tension from that was the whole point of his work. Postmodernism won in the end when he killed himself.
Last few pages of this story are some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read.
I don't think that DFW was talking about anyone other than himself in this story.
I don't see why he doesn't just recognise this and make an attempt to change. If he's smart enough to analyse himself so acutely, he's probably smart enough to creatively think of ways to change. And the fact that he's so sickened by it suggests that there's an alternative which is wholly worth pursuing otherwise it'd just be him being dissatisfied with it and dissatisfied with life generally.
I stopped half way through so maybe he addresses this but it seemed like a faggot who just couldn't be bothered to do anything because he's a puss and not because he's a fraud.
>>7879923
Because it was an unchangeable part of his core nature. There are a lot of things you can change about yourself but trying to change everything isn't possible.
>>7879945
I don't think trying to change that is even close to impossible. Just hard, which again comes to him being a puss. Again, I haven't read it but it all but apart from calling it out he just seems to beat himself up about it over and over and then get sad.
What does he expect?
As for doing everything for a reaction, it's just laziness to suggest there's nothing you can do about that. You'll always be concerned socially as humans are social but as for there being no way to alter your relationship there, that's BS.
>>7879962
You don't think it is because you've never actually been in that kind of position.
>>7879970
I have, though. As I imagine most have, which is why this story is so well loved. I just made an effort to change and have seen some progress but still have areas to improve.
>>7879985
dunno why i put a comma after have
>>7879985
You only think you have. This more along the lines of needing to hack your cock and balls off with a rusty butter knife because you don't like the way having them is making you act.
Even if you realized you had a "problem" and knew what the "solution" was, if that was it, you wouldn't do it.
>>7880036
This is*
>>7880036
What position are we referring to exactly? Realising that everything you do/have done seems in large part to do with gaining approval. I've experienced that.
If that's not what it is then what is it
>>7880084
It's more than just that. If you still think of it as a behavioral problem you don't get it.
>>7880036
What the fuck are you talking about?
>>7880134
>If that's not what it is then what is it
>>7879962
>that is even close to impossible. Just hard, which again comes to him being a puss
Could be said about literally anything even remotely subjective. Coming out of depression by pulling yourself up the bootstraps is not impossible. Just hard, and if you can't do it you're a pussy.
>>7880140
He didn't realize that he was acting fake. That's the thing, there was nothing under the act. It wasn't even for the approval really, it was just who he was deep down; a fraud. He just --was-- fake.
In your case, it presumably was just something you learned to do for approval, in his case, it was how he would've behaved regardless.
>>7880168
>pulling yourself up the bootstraps
Ayn Rand pls go. Your """""philosophy""""" is a bad joke.
>He didn't realize that he was acting fake.
ehh
Also, it doesn't matter if there is nothing behind the act. There was nothing behind my act either. It's not like I had some more important shit I wanted to do but was addicted. I just lived around getting approval, it's who I was, there was nothing that I could perceive being behind it, it's just what all i did tended toward automatically.
Also, he says he does it for approval and he even pinpoints a time when (he thinks) he learnt it. Not that he was conscious of it in a way he could articulate at the time. Neither was I.
>>7880168
Maybe this is just depression in which case there's a point to it but I thought the point was he is depressed because he's realised he's a hack rather than he's depressed and also a hack. If the depression is caused by being a hack then I think that's different
That doesn't mean when you realise this you have no recourse. If being a hack is an issue then that implies there's a way of being i.e. not a hack, which is good. You work to change into your conception of non-hack. Fairly simple.
Yeah suicide is sad and beautiful. WOW. I'm glad David 'Career Move' Wallace had the guts to show us that.yeah, yeah I criedBut Smithy is way, way sadder. I felt so bad for my dad (and now myself).
>>7880198
This can-do "every problem has a solution" thinking is immature and banal as fuck. I know you have to reject anything that runs counter to it because it undermines the progress you think you've made, but it's flat out wrong. There are problems with no solutions no matter what your shrink or pills tell you.
>>7880252
can quite easily use the same logic on your juvenile defeatist attitude.
Also, as soon as someone starts personal attacks you know at least a nerve is hit.
So, yeh, if you get out of the huff. Maybe think about it.
>>7880283
>no u
They really lobotomized you good, didn't they? If you're happy with your fairytale world where everything is possible if you just try hard enough, by all means, don't let the big bad anon take that away from you.
It's all bullshit and the most insidious aspect of it is how easily people like you are taken in by it. I'm done with you though. Try roping someone else in if that's what you need.
>>7880315
You don't even know what you're attacking about me now considering how little information about me I've given.. your strange insults don't even map on to what I'm like at all.
They say something about you though I suppose.
If you think anything other than Good Old Neon levels of apathy are fairytales then that's just pathology, not revealed truth. And pretty sad.
>>7880180
That was obviously sarcastic, since the whole concept of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" is retarded, when applied to both social and economic situations.
You can't will yourself out of depression, and neither can you hard work your way towards being a multi-millionaire.
I feel this thread got a little sidetracked...Maybe we can shift back to the beauty of DFW's prose?
What do you all think of the laughter/crying/non-vocal emotion as true expression of the 'ocean' within us all? I found it a very poignant and moving idea.
>>7879411
I was talking about pomo philosophy, not literary styles. Jesus Christ.
>>7882498
>What do you all think of the laughter/crying/non-vocal emotion as true expression of the 'ocean' within us all? I found it a very poignant and moving idea.
I genuinely don't remember that part and I read that storylast year
>>7882522
At the end, where his writing begins to pick up this breakneck pace, he writes about how only when we laugh or cry do we 'open the door' as opposed to 'peer at each other through the keyhole.' I found it an incredible passage.
Wallace wrote with contempt for Neon. He wasn't Neon.
>>7882741
He had contempt for himself.
>>7882741
Wallace was absolutely the narrator of the story. He both was and wasn't, as seen with him reading the news about his 'old school friend' dying in the car wreck. It was another paradox, that Wallace had killed himself, that he had written to the reader still, that his story both advocated for and argued against suicide.
If you don't think DFW was the narrator, I don't know what to tell you.
>>7882697
That analogy is impressive, I do remember it, ye, didn't really think you were describing that one.
Wasn't the door something you couldn't ever open and the content was leaking constantly, just at a very miserable rate?
>>7882791
I dont know what to tell you, it's written in the first person and the narrator is the guy Wallace is remembering at the end. At the end, the guy, as a ghost, is watching Wallace close his eyes and remember him. He's the narrator the whole time. At no point is Wallace the narrator. No amount of mental gymnastics changes that.
