My Depressed Person (A Monologue)

Abstract

A friend recommended a story by David Foster Wallace called Depressed Person. My friend has never been really depressed, although she is well aware that depression, psychotherapy, mental instability, clinical diagnoses, crazy behavior, internal pain, lack of self-esteem, alternative therapies, crystal-gazing, the whole nine yards of contemporary malaise and its panaceas are all around her. A keen student of her culture, she admired this story because its language is so dead-on and pulls you into an experience of psycho therapy. I know that others have found it insulting to that practice, but when I read it I did not see it that way, nor do I now, even knowing that in none of its manifestations was Freud's proliferating legacy able to save the story's author. What I saw instead was a brilliant narrative (if something so pain fully circular can be said to be a narrative at all) driven by the enact ment of unremitting self-consciousness. Its forward motion proceeds at the pace of therapy, which is to say in a series of repetitions and involutions that border on the grotesque; a few developments along the way tug you forward, while the central character, the depressed person herself, never moves off the dime. No matter what happens she is at the bottom of a well and all she can see hear touch feel taste smell is herself. The brilliance of the story is its double action: the free indirect discourse of excruciating self-centeredness and the linguistic play around its ouroboric tedium. Reading it was painful and fascinating. First, there's the digressive style, and then the inter minable footnotes that keep interrupting the flow of the narrative, which as I said is not flowing much at all. It's a problem, keeping the different tracks running along at the same time, jumping back and forth and up and down on the page. I finally gave up reading it the first time through and had to go back later. At one point a dramatic turn surprises the loose shape of the story, springing the traps of self-centeredness and skepticism toward psychotherapy and other professional techniques for easing mental anguish. That's almost all I want to say about the story, because what really made it so riveting was my intimate and long-term association with