Narrative Crisis and Renewal in the Age of Information: David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy”

Abstract

ABSTRACT David Foster Wallace’s late fiction powerfully dramatizes twenty-first-century information saturation and its dehumanizing effects. In “Mister Squishy,” the lead story in Oblivion (2004), the threat of information overload and the attendant crisis of narrative are thematized through the story’s staging of a central tension between statistical (quantitative) and narrative (qualitative) significance. Despite its numerous “anti-narrative” features, “Mister Squishy” is rather ingeniously designed to compel the reader’s narrative interest and participation by exploiting natural readerly “needs” – for narrative relevance, coherence, and closure. Wallace activates these readerly needs through his careful manipulation of how and when key information is revealed. The story’s dramatic shifts in pacing and perspective, and its oscillations between narration and description, combine to create extraordinary moments of suspense and surprise which drive both plot and reader forward. In this way “Mister Squishy” plays with the cognitive-affective dynamics of storytelling throughout, foregrounding them for our reflection. Ultimately, the story’s thematic concerns and the reader’s enactive performance of the text work together to reinforce the story’s ultimate affirmation of narrative as an essential meaning-making act and a central aspect of what it means to be human.