Towards an Ethics of Reading: Syntax and Self-Care in Depression Narratives

Abstract

ABSTRACT The representation of mental illness in literature has led to various renewed forms of engagement with the figure of the reader. Depression texts, in particular, provide the stage for a conversation about how the reader must be oriented toward depression in its written form (a textual and therapeutic counterpart to the talking cure). In this regard, a close reading of David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” reveals the demands placed by the depression text on the reader for a careful practice of reading – as in, the mimicry of therapeutic care, a convoluted carefulness in language. This textual demand is reflected in the grammatical and syntactical choices in the short story and in the stylistic tension between elements of novelistic discourse (omniscient third person narrator, deadpan realism, long hypotactic sentences, etc) and clinically prescribed modes of narrating depression. This forces the reader to engage with – if not take on – the role of a caregiver (i.e., the reader marked by a therapeutic function) and to participate in the writer’s desire for a companion in his self-care process.