Activity

notwithstanding his particular idiolect

Skeletal narrative refers to a strategy by which Wallace embeds the seeds of textual and interpretive unraveling within the narrative voice of a story; a narrator (often but not always first-person) begins to tell a story, but through asides of tonal slippage reveals another layer of narrative under the surface, ultimately losing control of the primary narrative vocabulary and confessing or revealing what was hidden.

This strategy, which I have termed "skeletal narrative," is one whereby Wallace destabilizes a narrative by means of elements embedded within the narrative itself

a sort of iteration of the dialethic imperative of deconstruction, such that every text, every narrative, every theory, contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction