The balance scale, I argue, was the image to which he kept returning for reconciliation of his varied ambitions, beginning from his naming of his first protagonist--an LB--after a standard unit of weight, money, and work (from the Latin libra, balance) and continuing through his romancing of IRS balance sheets.

[...] Wallace also argues that literary texts are ideally engaged with proving existence: Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress should have been titled "I EXIST", which Wallace says is the "signal that throbs under most voluntary writing--& all good writing" [...]

Unlike Pynchon, however, Wallace does not wish to dump the legacy of Calvinism; he seeks to build fictions around work and the fervent call to work, an activity he recurrently sees not just in terms of the labor theory of value but, through the lens of Hegel, as the only way of creating a fully viable self. Whether through an executive washroom attendant, diligent cruise-ship workers, or an actuary who dies prematurely of a heart attack, Wallace consistently makes work heroic and tragic, its lack, avoidance, or meaninglessness a sign of his most lost, and, in the realm of laborless capitalist value extraction, most evil figures. Absorption in work seems to be a reliable antidote to depression and feelings of worthlessness. Hegel's bondsman is a recurrent trope, as is metaphysical slavery in general.

The denigration of work, the celebration of efficiency, and the worship of the market are all hallmarks of the ideology that has dominated the United States since the late 1970s, neoliberalism. [...] At his most political, Wallace chronicles the long-term infiltration of neoliberal ideology into the American and global scene. Reagan's union busting plays a role in my analysis of Broom, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) figures in Infinite Jest, which repeatedly makes ideas of freedom and trade, those neoliberal bywords, cross from political and economic spheres to the complexly interpersonal.

Wallace weds to the perspective of Hardt and Negri a Wittgensteinian awareness that there can be no metaphor capacious enough to capture language's operations.

[...] the drug's use of "cattle-endocrine derivative" (B 149) suggests, via the etymological links between cattle and capital the making of humans themselves into pliable capital.

Rick's R.V. initials [...] translate to random variable in mathematical parlance, whereas Lenore often has the qualities of a constant.

The Stonecipheco minion Neil Obstat Jr., meanwhile, is named for the phrase of papal censorship, nihil obstat ("nothing hinders"), in a corollary to legalistic control over language.

N.R.K., Keller's initials, together sound like "anarchy", and this order that philosophy might bring to this nervous boy should allow him to grow up, or somehow rise (keller is German for basement).

[...] the open-ended, state-run lottery is a salutary vision: in losing week after week, Lenore is actually paying into a civic fund that is not unlike taxes, a fund of commonwealth that the young Wallace tentatively steps toward here. Many U.S. lotteries have historically been legally set up to support states' public-education systems, another sign of Lenore's involvement with learning (though increasingly such claims about state lotteries are truthless advertising).