The Shaping of Storied Selves in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

Abstract

Postmortem retrospectives of David Foster Wallace have too often painted him in broad strokes as either a postmodern trickster, enthralled with literary gamesmanship and irony, or, perhaps more commonly, as an apostle of the earnest and the straightforward. This essay attempts to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of Wallace's relationship to sincerity and irony through a reading of his final work, The Pale King, alongside key statements from interviews and published essays. The most well-developed sections of The Pale King portray characters for whom a commitment to sincerity can be just as much a danger as a commitment to irony. For these characters, moving toward adulthood means leaving childish fixations on sincerity behind and calling upon new parts of themselves that may be accessible only through performance, pretense, and artifice.