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[...] Part of Fogle's narrative occurs in 1977, and here Wallace plays one last time with presidential rhetoric on commonwealth themes. In one scene, Fogle's father returns home unexpectedly to find his son and friends stoned and with the heat turned up, creating another hothouse, perverting the _o…

[...] Another of Wallace's handwritten drafts of "Oblivion" even begins with a sentence referring to Dryden and Prudential Insurance's 1875 origins--as though Wallace considered maing the perversion of the insurance company's mission more explicit in the story [...] In a tale of suburban New Jersey…

[...] His chronic "nightmare" from childhood is not a recurrence of the classroom scene but an anticipatory vision of the insurance-office desk order that awaits him--a room the size of a soccer field, "utterly silent" and with "a large clock on each wall," counting out an unbearable time (O 103)…

[...] An extension of Wallace's indictments in "E Unibus Pluram" and his Updike essay of the 1960s' "brave new individualism" (CL 54), "Smithy" laments the passing of a 1950s family-values-driven Lassie episode (a clear analogue for the enframed windows tale) and a future of destroyed communal …

[...] human decision can no longer disentangle itself from computing's complexity. Wallace seems to have been led to this point by Tor Nørretranders's The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, a book he heavily annotated and source of an idea central to his style in the last two book…