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Thompson addresses Wallace's markings in his copy of Tolstoy's What Is Art? that highlight a passage in which Tolstoy says: "but [art] is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of human…

This idea, that by being self-conscious about the way one observes and describes the everyday— the concrete and virtual environments of late 20th-century consumer capitalist society might constitute an ethical process is a long way from Lukács's idea that the only valid kind of fiction is that whic…

INTERPRET-ME fictions, thus, teach us that the abstract is concrete, the essence of everyday life. Wallace cites Voltaire's Candide (1759), Gombrowicz's Cosmos (1965), Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (1943), Sartre's Nausea (1948), Camus's The Stranger (1942), Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Ma…

Wallace chose philosophical fiction over philosophy because he saw fiction as the better chance to connect with his readers. He wanted to confront philosophical problems by making them concrete. He counted on fiction's "ability to talk meaningfully to us." Because of this intent, his fiction exists…

Two of Wallace's most famous nonfictional texts, "E Unibus Plu-ram" (1993) and This Is Water (2005), essential to Wallace's manifesto, are sociological to the core. In them, Wallace explores the causes of American social predicaments and submits solutions to them. This indicates the centrality of s…