Limitations of Postmodern Irony: How David Foster Wallace Writes a Superior Critique of American Consumerism in Infinite Jest Compared with Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’

Abstract

ABSTRACT David Foster Wallace witnessed how postmodern irony erodes cultural values by exposing the artifice of language and its human construction. The most egregious example Wallace found was the bestseller American Psycho (1991), by Bret Easton Ellis, which used postmodern irony to satirize American consumer culture in a way Wallace found overly cynical and too reductive. In this article, I explain how Wallace attempted his own critique of American consumer culture with Infinite Jest (1996) but used character-driven narratives to both critique consumerism and offer a humanistic alternative. I end with a discussion of how “New Sincerity,” a literary movement typified by Wallace and George Saunders, provides a model that uses postmodern irony to critique social structures that damage human lives, demonstrated by the narratives of Infinite Jest and Saunders’s short story “Sea Oak.”